Tools

Often asked question: is there any way to gather debug output of .NET program that is running on environment where Visual Studio is not installed? Yes, you can do it and you can do it for free with program called DebugView. Here’s how it works.

Today I got e-mail from JetBrains stating that there is dotPeek early build available for download. dotPeek is .NET assemblies decompiler that is offered for free and that should replace .NET Reflector (not free anymore). dotPeek will also be part of ReSharper 6. In this posting I will give you brief introduction about dotPeek.

Sometimes we need publisher/subscriber messaging in our applications to broadcast messages to different parts of system in real time. We can always build our own solution for this but we can also use something that is already there. In this posting I will show you how to use MemBus to send messages from MDI parent form to MDI child forms. (more…)

I made quick comparison of performance of four DI/IoC containers. I measured Unity,Castle Windsor, StructureMap and Ninject in two scenarios – resolving objects with empty constructor and resolving object with injected parameters in its constructor. Results are here.

I am auditing one big legacy application. I use Visual Studio 2010 modeling projects to visualize the design of this legacy application. When I wanted to get my UML diagrams to image files so I can insert them to documents I found no option for it. As it turned out we have to write extension for modeling projects and deploy it as Visual Studio 2010 extension. Here is the installer and source package of my UML.SaveAsImage extension.

In my last posting about code contracts I showed how code contracts are documented in XML-documents. In this posting I will show you how to get code contracts documented with Sandcastle and Sandcastle Help File Builder.

There are many programs that come with MSI installer and not every installer is free of bugs or small problems. If you are building your own installer using Visual Studio you may want to change it before publishing it to users. Here is little overview of my main free tool called Orca.

When changing tables in SQL Server Management Studio 2008 you may get the following error: Saving changes is not permitted. The changes you have made require the following tables to be dropped and re-created. I was surprised when I saw this message first but there is very simple solution.