Month: March 2008

Not much longer to wait for GTA IV, unless of course you’re hanging out for the PC version (as I am). There are a bunch of trailers here. Love the last one, which is done ala ‘koyanasqatsi ‘ (if you’ve never seen that film, go and get it. It’s amazing.).

Yesterday, 2 colleagues pointed me to two very useful tools for Visual Studio.

Mole is a data visualiser that has been tested on WPF, WCF, WF, WinForms and ASP.NET projects on VS2005 and VS2008, C# and VB.NET. Not only do you get a nice bit of software (for free!) but in addition, the creators have put together tutorial videos and a manual. You can download it here.

The other tool that was mentioned was PowerCommands for Visual Studio 2008 which seems to be an updated replacement for CoolCommands 3.0 (for Visual Studio 2005). Definitely worth a look.

Last but not least, I have not been keeping up with the latest developments in Mocking, namely Moq. This looks like an interesting library.

Thanks to John Barrett and Adrien Brown for the heads up.

I must have missed the announcement of Team Foundation Sidekicks version 2.0 back in January. This version introduces a number of bug fixes, new Code Review Sidekick and a Visual Studio integration package. It also supports both Team Foundation Server 2005 and 2008. If you’re not already using it, it’s a great add-on for TFS:

“Team Foundation Sidekicks is a suite of tools for Microsoft Team Foundation Server Administrators and advanced users providing Graphic User Interface for administrative and advanced version control tasks in multi-user TFS environments.”

Join us at the Perth .NET Community of Practice, April 3rd to hear Bill Poole talk about delivering on the promise of SOA. It is a commonly held belief that transitioning to a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) simply involves exposing a bunch of Web services. If only it were that easy! SOA is currently receiving much attention and is surrounded by considerable hype. As such, it is often misrepresented by various industry stakeholders in pursuit of their own agendas.

In this session, Bill will cut through the hype and misinformation surrounding SOA and provide a clear practical description of the design patterns and best practice that will help developers deliver on the promise of SOA.

TOPIC: Delivering on the Promise of SOA with Bill Poole
DATE: April 3rd, 5:30pm
VENUE: Excom, Level 2, 23 Barrack Street, Perth
COST: Free. All welcome.

Bill Poole is a Senior Consultant with Change Corporation, primarily consulting in Solution Architecture. With over nine years of industry experience, his professional interests include SOA, systems integration, large scale application development, as well as design patterns and best practice. More details here.

If you are using the .Net Compact Framework 3.5 and need to delve into memory allocations or performance related issues, then the Power Toys for .NET Compact Framework 3.5, released mid-December last year, are what you need. The word ‘toy’ in the title is perhaps a little misleading, as it contains some powerful tools:

• NETCF CLR Profiler – provides detailed views of the managed heap for diagnosing various memory management issues.
• NETCF Service Model Metadata Tool – allows you to generate a WCF client proxy to help consume WCF services on device.
• App Configuration Tool – on device tool for specifying what version of NETCF an application will run against, displaying installed versions of NETCF and displaying information about GAC DLLs.
• Remote Logging Configuration Tool – enables users to configure logging options on a NETCF device including: loader, interop, network, error and finalizer logs.
• Remote Performance Monitor and GC Heap Viewer – provides real time counter data (ranging from Garbage Collector activity to type loading info) on a running NETCF application. The GC Heap Viewer feature allows you to capture a snapshot of the managed heap while your application is running to view live references, and allows you to compare multiple snapshots to find memory leaks.
• NETCF Network Log Viewer – utility for viewing NETCF network log data.

If, like me, you are using the .NET Compact Framework 2.0, you still have access to the Remote Performance Monitor (SP1) and the GC Heap Viewer (SP2). Steven Pratschner’s blog entry “Analyzing Device Application Performance with the .Net Compact Framework Remote Performance Monitor” is a quick introduction to getting started with the RPM.

David Kline has a post describing the counters viewable through the RPM here.

Quick Tip: if you click on “View GC Heap” in the RPM, don’t keep clicking it when nothing appears! It takes a while to gather the required info… 🙂 Why would anyone sane think a click hadn’t registered? Well, I swap my mouse from left to right hand, and quite often remote desktop into machines without the mouse buttons reversed, so my finger sometimes ‘forget’ which button is a left-click!

This page has a roundup of current free and special offers on MS learning products. Don’t forget, if you’re a member of your local user group, you can also take advantage of the ‘pass one, get one free’ certification promotion running until 31st May 2008.

Just wanted to wish my brother, Leonard, Happy Birthday for today! I’m pretty sure he doesn’t read my blog, but what the heck!

I came across this article in the Microsoft Mobile PC newsletter: With a Can of Air, Hackers Can Steal Encrypted Data from Mobile PCs. Gotta love it!

I sometimes lament that Perth is so far from the Eastern States, we miss out on free training events and international speakers. Well we won’t be missing out on the Readify Developer Network events for much longer, as Readify are going to be establishing an office in Perth! More news to follow….