Tobler.SoftwareArchitecture()

Now in frequent use in my dev environment, I can highly recommend Matthew Nolton's XmlPreCompiler, a GUI front-end to Chris Sells' command-line tool, XmlSerializerPreCompiler.  These are very handy when you need to vaidate that some assembly can be serialized.  Unfortunately, it appears that I have to drop the XmlPreCompiler.exe and XmlPreCompiler.exe.config directly into the directory where the assemblies I am testing (and their dependencies) exist; I apparently cannot just drop XmlPreCompiler into my \Bin directory or somewhere on my path.  If I do that, XmlPreCompiler does not seem to find the assembly's dependencies.  The tool still makes my "must have" list.

While integrating some code, yesterday, I discovered how to embed resources "files" - such as JPG or GIF images, htm files and xsl files - into your assembly manifest.  You can then access them via reflection.  The first article to examine about this is John Gallardo's Embedding and Using Resources in C#.  After that, read up a bit more in Chris Sells' Microsoft .NET Framework Resource Basics. 

When you are done, you will know about untyped manifest resources and typed resources (stored in resx files).  One advantage of the manifest approach is that you can bundle resources into an assembly that you can distribute to be used in some host application without having to introduce a bundle of files into the host's solution tree.  This is a very cool and useful feature.

Edwin Evans has created a very useful CollapseAll Macro for Visual Studio .NET.  For the umpteenth time, I had to go looking for it again so I'm quite certain that I want to put a link to it here for my use and yours.  You will find this simple tool extremely handy when you are trying to deal with very large solutions with lots of projects and sub-folders!

RUnit lets you run NUnit tests from within ASP.NET.  Having beaten my head bloody against doing something very similar, I am very impressed with this elegant piece of work.  Nice job!

Of Tobler.Tech(), someone kindly said, "But you're not a network tech!"  They're right; I'm not.  What do I do?  Well, software architecture.  Alfred Korzybski warned us against the semantic hazards of identification.  I am *not* Tobler.SoftwareArchitect.  Software architecture is something I do, not what I am.  So, let's try Tobler.SoftwareArchitecture().  Hopefully, this weblog name will stick for awhile.  Otherwise I may need to change it to "Nom de Jeur."

Simon Guest has a great article on the Top Ten Tips for Using Virtual PC 2004.  This is a major tool that can let you compute in multiple environments.  Really a "must have" for serious Microsoft-based software development shops.

So, I had this trial version of some software installed on my system.  The vendor's uninstall did not correctly remove it.  What to do?

I didn't know about this before, but there is a Microsoft tool for such quandaries, The Windows Installer CleanUp Utility.  If you're not cautious, you could probably cause yourself some grief with this tool, so "Caveat User!"

I am always interested in code generation tools and handy utilities to reduce the amount of time wasted repeating what has already been done.  I have found Eddie Velasquez's Code<Template>.NET a very handy VisualStudio,NETadd-in.  It just sits up there in the upper right-hand corner of my IDE.  I occasionally put templates into it.  I frequently push the magic button and get nicely formatted and debugged blocks of code that I can tweak a little instead of writing them from scratch.  Yes, there are other tools out there but this one is quite unobtrusive and helps me get the job done.  I strongly recommended having a look at it.  Of course, as always, YMMV.