LINKBLOG for January 28, 2007

• .NET slave - Catch the right closing event


• C# and VB.NET Comparison Cheat Sheet: ASP Alliance


• .NET Cheat Sheets - Just Sayin’ More Words


• New Year's Resolutions for Coders - Monkey Bites / Wired Blogs


• Impersonation Failure : Beating A Dead Horse


• Creating Network Aware Applications with System.Net.NetworkInformation - protected virtual void jaysonBlog {


• The Big Red Button - The Daily WTF In total, it took three milliseconds for the kid to run over and push the Big Red Button, and over seventy-two hours for the system administrators to fully restore the virtual systems to their previous states from backup


• The Joy Of Programming - the.codist{}


• The Anti Team - Jeremy D. Miller


• Why Drag & Drop doesn't work - Ayende @ Blog


• Enterprise .Net Toolkit: Unusual Suspects - Gojko Adzic


• The Big Picture (A review of Dreaming in Code, by Scott Rosenberg)- Joel on Software I just received my copy of the book in the mail some days ago and it's a wonderful insight in the mind of some of the biggest developers of the last quarter century
  


• Developers are from Magrathea, Customers are from Ursa Minor Beta - Gojko Adzic


• Rock-Solid Requirements (In Relation To Design) - Continuous Learning


• A network sniffer in C# - Code Project
  


• Five Things You Didn't Know About Me (and my office) - Coding Horror One of the most interesting 5-things coming around these days, or rather: one of the few 5-things that even was interesting because of taking the theme to it's extreme

(About) 10 Steps Towards Documenting Your C# 2.0 Assemblies

Some time ago I used NDoc , a tool to "generate API documentation from .NET assemblies and XML documentation" . But how unfortunate is it that it does not work with Framework 2.0 nor are there plans to upgrade the tool (via).
Sandcastle to the rescue. After the SandCastle (*) installation is finished however, you won't find a shortcut in the Start menu. Turns out we have to do it all by hand. Allow me to save you half an hour of your life by offering these steps (for free!):

1. Go to the Sandcastle directory under \Program Files


2. Run MRefBuilder.exe on your assembly and see it spit out some XML, direct the output to an XML file


3. Offer the generated XML file to BuildAssember.exe. This will give you a nice error message
   Could not find file BuildAssembler.exe.config


4. Utter the words "Well, duh..." (that's what I did)


5. plug the message in Google and arrive at some information telling you about the Sandcastle Help File Builder so go there


6. Download and install the latest version. Fire it up and notice the remarkable resemblance with NDoc 1.3


7. Find an entry under Start and click it - (finding this is already candy at this time)


8. Open a documented assembly and finally build your first help file...
   > BUILD FAILED: De objectverwijzing is niet op een exemplaar van een object ingesteld
   In English: Object reference not set to an instance of an object


9. remember that you just switched from your virtual machine (b.t.w. once you've started to try all new software in a virtual machine first you'll never go back) back to the host and that probably Sandcastle Help File Builder will need Sandcastle itself for processing the assemby :-)
   > BUILD FAILED: Unable to find XML comments file: Unknown.xml. We need a comments file - edit build settings for your project in Visual Studio and ask for an XML documentation file


10. "Build the help file" / Control-Shift-B (they did have Visual Studio in mind here...). This can take a while so get some coffee.

Finally you'll find a .chm file which just begs to be opened, so help yourself. Notice that the .chm file works........ at least if you open it from your local hard drive. However, when you put it on a network drive to show it to someone else "the page cannot be displayed" pops up in the right pane. The index still works however. Must be something wrong with the reference to Framework documentation or something. But that's for another time.


11. realise that even help files are a world in itself

probably to be continued...

(*) I'm using the December CTP so these reflections might be different in your case

LINKBLOG for January 19, 2007

• Skill sets still decide choices between C#, VB.NET and Java - Theserverside.NET
  


• Web-based Whiteboarding for Software Developers - Software by Rob
  


• Developers are from Mars, Programmers are from Venus - Hacknot


• Are you a programmer or a developer- Thinking Out Loud (developers are capable of building the software that programmers use...)
  


• Throw vs Throw ex
  


• AutoPatcher.com - All Windows Updates in one package!
  


• Debug Leaky Apps - Identify And Prevent Memory Leaks In Managed Code (MSDN Jan 2007)
  


• What I've Learned from Sales, Part II: Wanna Bet? - Raganwald
  


• 6 Software Tips For Hardware Makers
  


• Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Meta (Technology Review, Part I)
  


• Why do we need a [Flags] attribute on enums?
  


• Perry Loh : Don't have the time to install VS 2005 SP1 ?
  


• Fun with System.IO.Directory.Delete - Marcelo's WebLog
  


• Orthogonal Code - Jeremy D. Miller (The Shade Tree Developer)
  


• Managing Exceptions in .NET
  


• Teaching an Old Dog New Tricks: The Problem is Complexity
  


• AssemblyFileVersions: 2.0.0.071005 is bad, but 2.0.0.061005 is good - Frans Bouma
  


• How Virtual Methods Work - Ayende @ Blog
  


• Collective Code Ownership - James Shore
  

LINKBLOG for January 5, 2007

• Garbage Collection and the IDisposable interface - James Higgs


• My Personal Pet Peeves I See in Other People’s Code


• Ninety Days - Rands In Repose


• The Complete, Unquestionable, And Total Failure of Information Security - Security Absurdity.com


• Economizing can be penny-wise and pound foolish - Raganwald


• On PC Power Saving -- S1 to S3 standby


• Hunt down buggy .NET code faster


• Give Your Manager A 500% Productivity Enhancement


• Programming Today Is Too Hard, Shouldn't It Be Getting Easier? - the.codist{}


• Getting the list of loaded assemblies - CLR Hoser


• How to hire a programmer - Karl Seguin, MVP


• Product Review: VisualSVN, Subversion plugin for Visual Studio - Jeffrey Palermo [C# MVP]


• CLR Inside Out: Using concurrency for scalability -- MSDN Magazine, September 2006


• Quite BASIC -- Web BASIC programming


• Logging anti-patterns Gojko Adzic


• Rands In Repose: Malcolm Events


• And Microsoft has Won - SecretGeek


• Ayende @ Blog - The Problem of Open Source in the Microsoft World


• What code DOESN'T do in real life (that it does in the movies) - Drivl.com


• Quick Tip: Sharing code between multiple projects in Visual Studio 2005 - David Kline


• Use "Find As You Type" Search in Visual Studio 2005 - the How-To Geek


• How to: Code Service Dependencies -Jan Schreuder on .NET


• x Random Thoughts on Joel’s Lego Programming Article - matches[k].Year


• 20/20: Top 20 Programming Lessons I've Learned in 20 Years


• Mike-O-Matic » Facing Objections? You’re Talking to the Wrong People.


• CPU Temperature Monitor


• Composed Method Pattern - Jeremy D. Miller -- The Shade Tree Developer


• Flattening Arrow Code - Coding Horror


• Mfartura's blog : Real Case: IIS and Asp.Net hanging or poor performance (intermediary)