You've reached the internet home of Chris Sells, who has a long history as a contributing member of the Windows developer community. He enjoys long walks on the beach and various computer technologies.
Thursday, Dec 12, 2002, 2:28 PM in Tools
ADO.NET -- Offline and On Tap
Here. "In the .NET* Framework, rich clients can bring database servers to their knees, just like Web-based applications. But with the disconnected nature of ADO.NET, your rich clients can manipulate and analyze database data without impacting the database server. Once you have the data in the rich client, you can do high-performance analysis of the data—including sorting, filtering, and querying—without expensive server calls. In this article we will show you how to use DataSet, DataView, and XmlDataDocument to make your rich clients work with database data in a disconnected way."
Saturday, Dec 7, 2002, 11:43 AM in Tools
WinForms Control Inspector -- Spy++ for .NET
Here. "ControlInspector hooks on to all events on a given control, user-control or form and shows when they are fired, along with any eventargs. It even handles custom events and custom event args using dynamically generated assemblies." This looks *very* cool and was inspired by DevelopMentor's Guerrilla .NET course. Wahoo!
Thursday, Nov 14, 2002, 3:11 PM in Tools
VBTV Episode 2: DO NOT WATCH THIS SHOW!
Here. Actually, I think you probably should watch it. I find VBTV very amusing. : )
Thursday, Nov 7, 2002, 12:27 AM in Tools
Regular Expressions in .NET
Here. Michael Weinhardt and Chris Sells plumb the depths of .NET's regular expression engine.
Sunday, Oct 13, 2002, 12:00 AM in Tools
Scancode Mapper
Scancode Mapper is a GUI tool for setting the Scan Code Mapper for Windows Registry settings for Win2K+:
As an example of what this tool does to the Registry, this .reg file turns off the CapsLock key. Of course, changing scancode mappings is a risky business, so be sure of what you're doing before committing the changes and restarting Windows. No warranties extended. Use at your own risk. Enjoy. : )
Thursday, Oct 3, 2002, 5:51 PM in Tools
NUnit 2.0 Released
Here. From Bernard Vander Beken: From the readme: "This is the second major release of the xUnit based unit testing tool for Microsoft .NET. It is written entirely in C# and has been completely redesigned to take advantage of many .NET language features, for example custom attributes and other reflection related capabilities." "In the next few weeks we will be formulating the next release trying to incorporate as many requests as possible."
Friday, Sep 20, 2002, 12:08 PM in Tools
NUnit 2.0 RC3 available
Here. From Bernard Vander Beken: From the release notes of this unit testing framework: "This barring any unforeseen new critical bugs will be the last V2.0 release candidate. We will not be adding any additional features until V2.0 is released which we expect now to be sometime around 26 September, 2002."
Tuesday, Sep 10, 2002, 12:00 AM in Tools
TAPI Explorer
I built the TAPI Explorer (tExplorer) to allow me to understand the various capabilities of the telephony devices installed on my system when I was developing TAPI applications and writing my TAPI book. It grew into a utility for showing all line, address and phone capabilities as well as other TAPI settings, e.g. country codes, telephony locations, service providers, etc. If you're running into TAPI errors that you don't understand, TAPI Explorer will help you work through them.
This version has been run and tested on Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000 and Windows XP and supports TAPI versions 1.4 through 3.1.
VS.NET Source | VC6 Source (previous version)
Wednesday, Sep 4, 2002, 1:05 PM in Tools
Microsoft XML Diff and Patch 1.0
Here. "Microsoft XML Diff and Patch is a set of tools for comparison of two XML documents and application of the changes (patching). XML Diff detect addition, deletion and other changes between two XML documents. It also detects structural changes like a move of a XML subtree. It produces Xml Diff Language Diffgram (XDL diffgram or just diffgram) that describes the differences between the two XML documents. The diffgram can be then used to display these differences or to perform a patch operation using the XML Patch tool." I know that this tool has been sorely needed in the XML community for a while and now MS has released one.
Thursday, Aug 29, 2002, 12:04 PM in Tools
VC++ Jacket for the Best Managed C++ Entry
Here. Things are still heating up in the prize category. Not only has O'Reilly just donated a year subscription of Safari, along with a bunch of .NET book packs, but Nick Hodapp, a PM on the VC++ team at Microsoft, has just donated a VC++ Jacket to the best "Spend A Day With .NET" coding contest entry that's written in Managed C++. The anticipation is killing me!
Sunday, Aug 18, 2002, 1:43 PM in Tools
Genghis v0.3 Release
What's new in Genghis v0.3:
- Screen shots for everything.
- Source available via CVS repository.
- MRU support, including both in-menu and sub-menu support.
- A much more robust set of validation components modeled along the lines of the ASP.NET validation components, including required, regex, range and comparison validators.
- FileDocument component for document/dirty bit handling.
- Wizard support, including changing page groups on the fly!
- Custom state treeview so that you can set and show all three checkbox states.
- A class to expose the WinForms HandleCollector so that you can put your own custom resources into it.
- A Screen Saver class.
- A bunch of file utility classes, including retrieving mapped drives, retrieving shares and path resolution.
- A cursor changer class that works with the using block.
- A WebCommandLineHelper class to parse command line arguments from the URL used to launch href-exes.
- Update to the FileNameDialog to include newish flags.
Friday, Aug 16, 2002, 1:21 PM in Tools
NUnit 2.0 RC1 available
Here. From Bernard Vander Beken: Highlights of the updated unit testing framework for .NET: - Attribute based mechanism for identifying test fixtures and test methods. - Automatic creation of test suites. - Improved GUI runner allowing dynamic reloading of test assemblies. - The Console runner supports XML output. - Mostly backward compatible with NUnit 1.0.
Friday, Aug 9, 2002, 3:58 PM in Tools
VBTV
Here. From Jesse Ezell: If the .NET show wasn't enough for you, Microsoft is producing another show. Supposed to be slightly irreverant and not for the faint of heart.
Thursday, Jul 25, 2002, 3:08 PM in Tools
Beta-2 of Nunit 2.0 is available
Here. "Some of the highlights of the new release include the following: "- Attribute based mechanism for specifying test and test fixtures. "- New Forms Interface that displays Tests and TestSuites in an Explorer like fashion. The interface allows you to run individual tests and/or suites from the forms interface. "- Automatic construction of suites based on namespaces. Just provide an assembly and the test runner constructs a suite of all TestFixtures in the assembly. "- Minimal amount of effort to upgrade due to inclusion of a backwards compatibility class called TestCase and the framework also looks for methods that begin with "test" regardless of case as it did in the past. "- XML output from the console program." [DOTNET-PRODUCTS]
Thursday, Jul 25, 2002, 1:12 PM in Tools
Microsoft XML Diff and Patch 1.0 Beta
Here. "The primary purpose of the tool is to be able to quickly detect node-level changes between versions of an XML document, and with enough granularity to support efficient patch and merge scenarios. The patch format can be used for fairly terse delta-encoding to transfer incremental changes across the wire as well. The tool is officially called "XmlDiff and Patch" and is implemented in managed code (sorry, no MSXML version). Currently you can only perform XML Diff through the web page, but the assembly should be available on that site very soon. I think it is considerably better than anything else available today, in terms of both performance and accuracy, and the API is a good fit with the System.Xml libraries, so it should be really easy for any VB/J#/C#/F# programmers to use." [netcrucible.com/blog]