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.
Friday, May 7, 2004, 7:26 AM in Tools
More Free WIndows Forms Controls:vbAccelerator
After posting a few sets of free Windows Forms controls, now I'm a magnet for the "but you forgot my favorite free controls site" emails, which I feel compelled to share with you. This time, it's the vbAccelerator site, which is a mix of VB6 and .NET controls, code and tools. The .NET stuff is here. Enjoy.
Thursday, May 6, 2004, 8:43 PM in Tools
Kent Sums Sums Up the P/Invoke Add-In Nicely: Whoa
Adam Nathan has taken the information from his extremely popular P/Invoke Wiki site and built an add-in to pull and drop P/Invoke signatures directly into VS.NET. Whoa, indeed.
Wednesday, May 5, 2004, 9:07 AM in Tools
FileDisassembler Add-In for Reflector 4.0
It turns out that the add-in model for Reflector 4.0 is so powerful that it enabled Denis Bauer to build an add-in that leverages the built-in R4 disassembler to disassembly an entire assembly into source code files. Very handy for curling up on a sunny afternoon with a chunk of source from your favorite assembly, a cigar and a single malt Scotch.
Sunday, May 2, 2004, 6:03 PM in Tools
More Free WIndows Forms Controls:xpCommon Controls
And the hits, they keep on coming...
Saturday, May 1, 2004, 12:14 PM in Tools
NetXP: More Free Windows Forms Controls
Roy points out some Windows Forms controls that Mike pointed out to him and now I'm pointing out to you: NetXP, which includes all kinds of fun controls and components for use for free for personal and freeware use. It's amazing the number of high-quality free .NET controls exist. Wahoo!
Monday, Apr 19, 2004, 7:32 PM in Tools
PInvoke.NET: Interop the Wiki Way
Here. Whoever put this site together had the right idea. I was hoping to work my magic to get MS to publish a giant interop DB, but instead of waiting, Adam Nathan (of .NET and COM: The Complete Interoperability Guide fame) put up a wiki to collect all of the P/Invoke signatures that the community already knows about. Yeah, baby! This could finally be a wiki I can get behind! (Sorry, Ward, but I've just never found a wiki that makes me want to hang out there...)
Tuesday, Apr 6, 2004, 2:24 PM in Tools
Son of Strike Debugging Inside Visual Studio .NET
Here.
In his June '03 Bugslayer column, John Robbins made a sideways comment when discussing Son of Strike (SOS), a debugging extension from Microsoft for doing all kinds of low-level, mixed native and managed code debugging.
What Jon said was this: "Interestingly, starting with Visual Studio® .NET 2003, you can load SOS when doing mixed-mode debugging." And then he didn't say how to load SOS into VS.NET, even after spending the rest of the article telling us how cool SOS was.
Luckily, Mike Stanton, an SDE on the CLR team, has created a set of instructions for loading SOS into VS.NET. Actually, he posted those instructions in December of last year, but it wasn't 'til today that they were accurate because it wasn't 'til today that I tried them and couldn't get them to work. Now they are and I can and I have all kinds of low-level goodness to explore with Son of Strike.
Monday, Apr 5, 2004, 5:49 PM in Tools
WiX: Open Source XML-Based MSI Creation
Rob Mensching, an MS SDE, has finally released his WiX tools for building MSI files from XML. I say "finally," because I've been using his tools for months to build the MSI files that MSDN puts up on microsoft.com/download. All of our downloads have to be wrapped in an MSI so that you have to agree to the EULA before you get the files. Plus, we need to bundle some descriptive text and author name in there, along with the code that pops open the install folder after the files have been installed. Instead of using VS.NET to create the MSI files for each set of folks, I built a tool and the best programatic interface to creating MSI files that I could find was easily Rob's. Check it out.
Friday, Apr 2, 2004, 10:18 AM in Tools
FxCop for SQL Server
If you were listening to the .NET Rocks show today, you heard me invent something that Microsoft has already shipped: The Microsoft SQL Server Best Practices Analyzer. <whew> One less thing I have to build myself. : )
Tuesday, Mar 30, 2004, 9:20 AM in Tools
Visual Studio 6 SP6
I used to live and die with Visual Studio Service Packs and the DevDiv Sustaining Engineering team has just released another SP for you Visual C++ 6 and Visual Basic 6 programmers. Millions of folks still use these products and it warms my heart that we're 2.5 generations past this, but still releasing SPs. I don't anticipate any more of them, though, so I recommend using this SP for your current projects and moving to Visual Studio .NET 2003 or Visual Studio 2005 on the next one, depending on the timing.
Thursday, Mar 25, 2004, 4:59 PM in Tools
Web Site Dedicated to Extending VS.NET
I swear I only stopped reading blogs for a coupla days, but interesting news has just surged! For example, I just found out that MSDN has an entire web site dedicated to extending VS.NET. This includes the legendary VSIP and a set of extensions that lets you build VSIP packages in managed code. Very cool.
[via Visual ActiveKent Sharkey .NET SE 3.11]
Thursday, Mar 25, 2004, 4:14 PM in Tools
VS.NET Whidbey Has a Command Shell Window Built It
It's well hidden, but Jason Olson points out that VS.NET Whidbey finally has a command shell built right in. Now if only it changed folders with my solution and support completion via the tab key, support F7 and F8...
Wednesday, Mar 24, 2004, 7:13 PM in Tools
Very Cool Web Service Testing Tool from Mindreef
I knew Mindreef had cool testing tools, but I just found one today on their web site that I ended up using all afternoon. You feed it a WSDL URL and it generates a form, allowing you to see the SOAP request and response packet in several formats include raw XML, to pseudo-code, pretty-printed XML and tree. It's much more flexible then the built in one that ASP.NET provides and the price is right.
Wednesday, Mar 10, 2004, 9:11 AM in Tools
The VS7 Debugger doesn’t work. What can I do?
Mark Parks, a PM on the Visual C# Debugger QA team, has posted ways to fix common VS.NET debugger problems. He's even got a fix for why I can't debug the localhost version of my site. Thanks, Mark!
Tuesday, Mar 9, 2004, 8:06 PM in Tools
Genghis v0.5 Released
After much delay (man, this Microsoft gig keeps a person busy), I'm happy to announce Genghis v0.5:
Enjoy.