AddressOf.com : Tools

Cambridge, England, UK

CorySmith — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 13:57:00 GMT

Next Monday, I'll be headed to the UK (Cambridge) for a "vacation". As it turns out, this is also the home of Red Gate software, makers of SQL Toolbelt, ANTS Profiler and .NET Reflector.

I'll be spending some time with them while there; so if you have any questions / comments you'd like me to pass along, feel free to send them my direction.

I'm not, in the slightest, embarrased to admit that I'm pretty excited to hang out with the team now responsible for .NET Reflector.

Why?

CorySmith — Sun, 16 Jan 2011 15:17:00 GMT

Why aren't there any decent audio libraries for .NET? Don't get me wrong, it's nice that the framework supports some audio features in a very simple way if you want to just play something. However, if you need access to the audio data to manipulate it in whatever way or just want to know the duration, play location, audio levels, etc... why is it so difficult? To add, there are now nearly a handful of audio sub-systems to choose from... Windows Multimedia, Asio, DirectSound and the new audio subsystem included with Windows Vista / Windows 7. It seems that if you want to play in the world of audio, you really have to get your hands very dirty by digging at full depth into API land.

Oh well, guess it's time to get my hands dirty. ;-)

Adventures in Windows Vista (x64) - Part 2

CorySmith — Thu, 24 May 2007 13:27:00 GMT

After running Vista x64 on another machine for a few days; installing various pieces of critical software and seeing that everything seemed to be working smoothly... I've made the full leap on my main desktop machine (the one that now has 4GB of memory).

Some interesting "facts":

Windows Experience Index reports my processor running at a 5.0 (was 4.9 in 32-bit).
Memory running at a 4.8 (was 4.6 in 32-bit).
I have 66% of my memory free while running Outlook, Visual Studio 2005, SmartFTP, a few instances of Internet Explorer, several gadgets, Xfire and SQL Server Management.
Windows Vista had *ALL* drivers available from Microsoft upon installation completion. Yes, this includes my scanner, printer and even the nVidia 8800 video card (which wasn't available January 30th for 32-bit, so it looks like it was added).
Lord of the Rings Online no longer pegs the memory meter when I have *everything* maxed out for the graphics option... thus no more thrashing the drive while playing and everything is beautiful!

Out Of The Box Experience

So the out of the box experience for installation has been pretty good thus far. Just in case, I do have 32-bit still available to me by rebooting, selecting the boot drive in the BIOS. In order to handle swapping versions, I've got 3 physical drives in the machine... the original drive, a "data" drive and a 10,000rpm drive running the x64 version of Vista. Windows Vista includes a pretty interesting new feature where you can go into your user folder, right click on a folder in there such as Pictures, click properties. Once you have the properties dialog visible, select the Location tab. At this point, you can have the folder located wherever you wish. What I've done is put various folders (Downloads, Pictures, Music, Videos, etc.) on the "data" drive (D:\). I've done this for both the 64-bit and 32-bit instances... so when I switch, all my "data" is still available.

Eventually I see me 100% on Vista x64; but just in case something comes up I can switch and still get work done.

Software Compatibility

Regarding software. So far so good. Experience has been that anything that runs on Windows Vista 32-bit seems to work (for the most part) on x64. I have had a few weird glitches such as:

Dungeons and Dragons Online: Stormreach - upon exiting the game, I get a dndclient.exe has stopped working generic error. Of course, I'm sending the error report, hopefully it will get resolved automagically.
Whatever the issue is with DDO, Lord of the Rings Online experiences the same problem... So Turbine (the developers) needs to fix it in two places.
Launching Windows Media Player and Windows Movie Maker for the first time gave me some COM registration errors. However, everything seems to work just fine as all my music, streaming video and local video plays (or edits in the case of video) just fine.

Multiplicity Update

An update regarding the Multiplicity issue I encountered in the previous post - this was operator error. It's been so long since I've installed Multiplicity, that I didn't realize that the Copy/Paste feature was optional and turned off by default. Turning it on, all works as expected.

Software Development "Issues"

More updates on the developer side of things. I needed to update my Movie Jukebox software to recompile as a 32-bit application since it appears that Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Compact Edition doesn't work in 64-bit mode. Strange.

Summary

All in all, so far the experience of moving to Windows Vista 64-bit is, thus far, a lot less problematic than moving from Windows 95/98 to Windows NT 4.0. I'll keep you posted...

It's 2:12am and I'm done with a new VS2005 Macro hack

CorySmith — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 05:13:00 GMT

I need to run it through it's paces, but I now have a VS2005 macro that will, whenever I successfully build a release mode project, package the project folder into a zip file named [ProjectName]_src_v[OutputAssemblyFileVersion].zip. And it doesn't require anything additional to be installed on the machine. And it's not using the zip functionality from the J# libraries either. This thing is all about leveraging the zip functionality that is built into Windows XP and above. So it's down to being Windows Vista (that's what I run) + Visual Studio 2005 + a macro (cut-n-paste it into the Macros IDE).

I'm going to run it for a few days to make sure it appears pretty stable and then make it available along with a short article explaining the processes that are taking place to accomplish what should be such a simple task. ;-)

Hmmm... Open Source recognizes VB... but Xbox 360 doesn't?

CorySmith — Thu, 17 Aug 2006 19:16:00 GMT

-- Begin Rant --

Now, I'm not sure what the “real” reason behind a decision (albiet a rumor, but I don't doubt it) of pulling the VB namespace from the modified Microsoft .NET Compact Framework 2.0 that is being done for the Xbox 360. My first question, not even VB related, is why in the world would a company want to create yet another instance of the .NET framework? How many of these things do we really need anyway? I mean, I thought the whole idea of the Microsoft .NET Compact Framework was that it was as small (yet robust) as possible and targetted pretty much any sort of device. I've been told a possible rational for this decision, but still, I'm not so sure I'm buying it. Now don't get me wrong, I understand that it might still be possible to write VB based applications targetting this new framework, except that you won't be able to leverage any of the niceties that are included in this namespace. And, I also understand, that if you really want to target this “device” that you'll do whatever is necessary; even if that means not writing in your language of choice. However, in this case, as I said, I'm not so sure about the motives of such a decision.

To get to the rational that somone suggested... the reason for not including it is because there is a need to have the entire Xbox Live Arcade redist to be less than 50mb in size. OK, sounds great. However, the (according to a folder on my drive at C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Smart Devices\SDK\CompactFramework\2.0\v2.0.WindowsCE, the Microsoft.VisualBasic.dll file is a mear 343kb in size. And?!?!?... why is it that these games utilizing this “custom” framework have to redist the framework themselves and hit the end user with that bandwidth (no matter what size this framework is)? Why not just deploy this base framework as part of a Live update and have it exist in the GAC... I mean the 360 is still a windows-based device, isn't it? Sure, it might be different processor spec, but I'm guessing that it's got windows goo in there somewhere, right? Even if this is not the case, it's a closed system... there should be some way to make such a deployment possible. I mean, come on, you're telling me that the game devoloper is responsible for redist (and maintenance) of a framework that Microsoft built that targets the device that they make and maintain through Live updates?

OK, so for the sake of argument, I do understand that not all users of the 360 have a HD (which, I believe was an error in judgement, but that's another story), so in order for some people (“losers“) to download Xbox Live Arcade games, they might be storing these on a memory unit (which, I think, is only 64mb). There's where this magic number of 50mb comes in... cause it sure aint because of bandwidth. ;-)

Even still, let's say for arguments sake that 343kb is just too much for *all* developers to suffer redistributing and the possiblity of a GAC deployment just isn't an option... then why not make it an option? Why alienate, yet again, what at one time (and as I'm told, still is) the largest software development userbase? I mean, there's even the KPL; which is using a BASIC syntax that is mostly about writing games (now, please, don't equate K(ids)P(rogramming)L(anguage) to BASIC, it's just another variation that exists... and, if you haven't looked at it, it's actually kind of cool.).

Now back to the 50mb thing, let's say, for arguments sake that you wanted to go over the 50mb limit. Whether this was due to the 343kb VB namespace (cause your developing in VB) or you just have a lot of content, but it's still not justifiable to deploy using any other model (because Live Arcade is just a great model, let's face it)... then wouldn't it make sense to allow for a larger distribution but with the limitation that it will only be available to Xbox 360 users who have a HD?

Another argument, that I've heard before, is that “there isn't any interest from the VB user base for leverage this tool”. Well, if you continue to alienate, how are any of them supposed to join in the game? Only the most hardcore and determined will do so. And yes, we'll suffer through reading documentation and samples that aren't in our language. We will continue to create our own “communities” to support one another, just as we always have. However, why does it have to be this way?

On another note, because of this, it just fuels more fire for the anti-VB crowd to say that Microsoft doesn't care about VB and VB is dead (yes, I've already been made “aware“ if this latest “argument“; I really don't make this crap up...).

What makes the people making the decision say “Ummm, we are targeting C# since C++ developers are interested in using C# because the syntax is similar.” This, I say, is such a load of crap. If this was true, then what would the the point of continuing development with C++, C++/CLI? And any C++ guy who's jumped into C# (that I've worked with) has said the same thing... C# is just VB with C-style syntax... and EVERYONE of them have moaned about being “managed”. Some of them eventually get the benefits, but many of them resist and say things like “the only way you'll take my pointers is from my dead, cold hands”. VB developers on the other hand have always gotten managed languages... it's the way it's always been (or at least supposed to be, bugs not withstanding).

Like I said, sometimes I just have to ask, what's the motivations surrounding some of these decisions.

-- End Rant --

Not feelin' the VB love from Microsoft...

CorySmith — Fri, 23 Jun 2006 17:05:00 GMT

In the last two days, I've encountered at as many instances where certain members within Microsoft just ain't showin' us VB users any love.

The latest Microsoft Download Notifications email states:

Download the Complete DirectX SDK

This software development kit includes the DirectX Runtime and the software you need to create DirectX-compliant applications in C/C++ and C#.
The Updater Application Block: Downloads: Home on GotDotNet.com states:

There is no Enterprise Library 2.0 Design tim (that's an excercise to the reader), there are still .NET 2.0 compilation warnings and we've only ported the C# version.

I can somewhat understand no love from the DirectX team. I can hear what they would say, “I numbers don't reflect VB developers as being people who are asking for DirectX”. Well, if you don't provide support for those users, target that audience, how are you supposed to hear from those users?

I've been told by a friend that works at a major game company that portions of the Xbox Developers Kit is leveraging VB. I'm not sure what portions and I haven't been able to get acknowledgement from anyone at Microsoft as to the validity of this information; however, I have no reason not to take my friends word for it. Given that developers within the walls of Microsoft are leveraging VB for tools like the XDK; where exactly are they getting their information stating that people like US don't want some love as well.

As for the Updater Application Block... no excuse. Previous releases contained code targeting VB and C#. Sure, I could convert the necessary portions over to VB to utilize the assemblies from my application; however, since the effort involved and the fact that I would of had at least 4 assemblies to include with my main assembly, I decided not to bother and roll my own. Don't get me wrong, if there would have been working examples in VB (not the whole thing, just examples... working examples... “ported” to .NET 2.0), I'd probably have utilized it even though the additional assembly issues just to save me some development/debugging time.

Why do I point this sort of stuff out? 'Cause I'm pretty sick of hearing from the C# guys... “Everything coming out of Microsoft is in VB.” Well, you know what... your wrong... wrong... wrong...

Living in a Land of Obfuscation

CorySmith — Mon, 08 May 2006 10:57:00 GMT

You know, I'm all for making some things available for free; but at the same time want to protect my “property” as much as possible. With great tools such as Reflector being available; you really need to consider using obfuscation to at least make it a little more difficult to reverse engineer your code. In addition, most professional obfuscators offer the ability to encrypt embedded strings; which allows for an added level of “security”. I quote security since it's nearly impossible to 100% protect anything; all obfuscation does is raise the level of entry to reverse engineer and modify the value proposition for doing so.

OK, so it's important to obfuscate. What kind of problems are you going to run into doing so?

Well, one of the biggest negatives is that you lose some of the *HUGE* benefits of reflection and debugging. If your code is not obfuscated and an error occurs; it's really simple to see where the error occured thus allowing you to quickly identify the problem and get it resolved. If all the class/method names are jumbled, you lose this benefit.

What else is there?

If you are utilizing serialization (and you might be and not even know it), you have to make sure that these classes/methods are not obfuscated (renamed); otherwise every time you compile and obfuscate, you could have newer names. Even if you were using an obfuscator that could remember the names from one compile to another; your resulting xml file (or whatever target) would contain these jumbled names and not the original... removing one of the benefits of XML in the first place... human readability.

Is there anything else?

Yes. Depending on the tool you are using, you might not have an integrated development experience within Visual Studio. If you are lucky enough to have one that is integrated, you might experience bugs introduced by the manufacturer of the obfuscation tool that causes “other errors” such as not being able to add Web References. I experienced this with a previous version of Dotfuscator and after chasing my tail in circles for a while, one of the things I tried caused Dotfuscator to notify me that there was a newer version available. When I uninstalled the previous version getting ready to install the newer one (why I had to do this with such an expensive product is beyond me, but...); I figured I'd try the add web reference problem. Sure enough, it was fixed. Installing the newer version didn't break it either, so now I'm golden.

Surely there is more...

Of course there's more. ClickOnce.

ClickOnce and Obfuscation don't have a great story at this stage of the game. Visual Studio makes it really simple to utilize ClickOnce deployment from within the environment. However, you can't integrated obfuscation as part of this process. So if you want to use obfuscation, you aren't able to use the integrated tool. :-(

However, all is not lost. There's a tool called MageUI. This tool allows you to modify the manifest files associated with ClickOnce. It's a manual process, but not too difficult to deal with once you get it initially setup. I'll post a follow up on how to use MageUI.exe.

And people say Microsoft isn't responsive...

CorySmith — Wed, 29 Mar 2006 03:02:00 GMT

Less than a week ago I reported a, albiet probably pretty minor, problem with the latest release of SyncToy for Windows XP (v1.1). I'm happy to report that SyncToy v1.2 for Windows XP has been made available that corrects the issues I raised!

Some people might complain that almost a week is too long. Understand that from the time that the problem was observed, reported, sent to the correct individual(s), priorities determined, project(s) shuffled, changes made, flowing through q/a, flowing through another team to get final publishing to the microsoft.com website... 4.5 business days is an awesome turn around time! And this is for a *free* product.

I know it's FREE... but still!!!!!!

CorySmith — Wed, 22 Mar 2006 20:33:00 GMT

I've been using a power toy from Microsoft called SyncToy v1.0 for Windows XP for some time now. It works great for syncronizing various file types between multiple machines. In one example I syncronize a projects folder across 5 machines (3 laptops and two pcs) so I can work on these projects on whichever machine I feel like doing so at the moment. I also use it do some syncronizing of video files recorded with Media Center Edition to the laptop(s) so I can watch these videos on the go. Of course, by syncronizing, I'm meaning that it only has to copy what is different; thus reducing the copying time.

It appears that a new version of this power toy was released sometime after 3/9/2006 and it's called, appropriately enough, SyncToy v1.1 for Windows XP. Not really sure what has changed from a functional standpoint... but I can tell you what has changed from a visual standpoint. AND IT'S NOT A GOOD CHANGE!

Before I move on to what the problem is, let me show you two screen shots.

SyncToy v1.0 for Windows XP

SyncToy v1.1 for Windows XP

See any difference in the UI? (Hint, look at the buttons.)

I know I might be a little anal in regards to this particular issue, but when I see something that is called:

SyncToy 1.1 for Windows XP

Then, to me, there's just some things it should do. First and foremost, it should look like something that is designed to run on Windows XP; meaning, it should utilize XP Visual Styles. Obviously it was done correctly in 1.0; but for some strange reason this somehow got “removed” from the 1.1 version. Why?

What I installed this new version on a new machine, I thought I had some sort of configuration problem. At first I didn't realize that there was a new version and running the 1.0 version on one machine looked correct and on the new machine (running 1.1) the buttons, listview, etc. were using the non-visual styles UI elements. Once I realized that the “new” version somehow dropped this; I had a WTF moment.

Why?!?!... Why!?!?... Why?!?!.... Oh! Why!?!?! has this changed? How is it possible that some lines of code, or a manifest file, from the previous version managed to “remove” itself from the new version/build?

Yeah... I know it's a free product... but come on... XP has been out for how long now? You'd think that XP Visual Styles would be the norm in software today... even more so... you'd think that if it supported visual styles that it would have continued to support it as a new version was released. Grrrrrr!!!

Note: As this is a visual issue, this doesn't mean I'm going to stop using the tool. It's just downright annoying. If you haven't looked at the power toy... do yourself a favor and do so. Lots of options to handle lots of scenarios.

(And for those reading my blog for a while... yes, this isn't the first time I've pointed this type of thing out.)

Google... smoogle...

CorySmith — Tue, 10 Jan 2006 19:21:00 GMT

I was talking with a friend of mine last night and the topic of Google vs. Microsoft came up. Essentially his stance was that Google is “winning” and it's too late for Microsoft to gain momentum to dethrone them in many areas. I, of course, had the opposite stance. So why do I have such a stance? Well, rather than explain that Microsoft, once they set their mind to something as a whole, has the money and resources to accomplish whatever target they have set. Rather than state that they have some of the most enthusiastic (meaning they really love their job) people working there; thus willing to do whatever it takes to get to said target. Why don't I just give a real world working... today... example...

Google Local

This is a pretty cool web-based application that arguably has brought AJAX into the forefront of todays geek speak. It is very cool and I have to give it to Google for introducing such innovation in the stagnant “driving directions” space. You can view maps in regular, satellite and hybrid modes. It does a pretty good job of searching for “stuff” on the maps as well. For example, “Hooters, Fort Worth, TX”.

Windows Live Local

When you browse to this “application” for the first time, you'll obviously think... “hmmm, looks a lot like Google Local”. That is about where the similarity ends though. At the top, you have two search fields. One for address and the other for “stuff”. Try typing in your own address in the second field. You'll notice that the map looks less cartoon'y (ala the Google one) and more like a real map. Want to see the satellite view? Click on aerial on the zoom box. This view is the equivalent of the Hybrid mode that Google has (but a lot better in my opinion). Now type in “Hooters” in the What field. If it doesn't find one, it will probably let you know you should try zooming out. That zooming out is a link. Select it and it will zoom out to the nearest Hooters. Continue to zoom out (using the scroll wheel on the mouse... something the Google one doesn't utilize) and the search will continue to run for the active viewing pane to add additional found “stuff”. You can also add additional “whats” and it will populate push pins for you. Speaking of push pins, you can right click anywhere on the map and add them, give them a name and description. These pins are added (along with address searches) to the scratch pad. You can email (or blog to “spaces”) the scratch pad to your friends. Now for the coolest thing (as if the rest wasn't cool enough), select a starting address from the scratch pad, right click on it and select driving from. Select another address and select driving too. You'll have a new toolbar window pop up with directions. In there is a turn by turn breakdown of the trip and it's also drawn on the full map. Select one of the turns. The map zooms to that point so you can see it on the aerial view. Oh yeah, almost forgot, notice how the toolbar windows are semi-transparent. Doh... and another... notice that the arial view doesn't have Google copyright goo stamped everywhere.

So I leave it to you, which one are you going to use?

Fort Worth .NET User Group Visual Studio 2005 / SQL Server 2005 INETA Sponsored Launch Event

CorySmith — Fri, 02 Dec 2005 19:31:00 GMT

When: December 13th, 2005

Come to the event for you chance to win a free copy of DVDs containing both Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005! There are *FIVE* of these to be given away, so you chance is pretty good...

Who's presenting? Good question... the answer is that Stephen Swienton (President FWDNUG and ASP.NET MVP) and Cory Smith (VP FWDNUG and VB MVP) are definitely presenting (possibly having one more person yet to be determined). The content is essentially the same as the official launch event, compressed down significantly. As for my portion of the presentation, I'll be touching upon a few items that I find “important” to the developer that wasn't included in the “official” presentations.

So come celebrate with your local users group the launch of two excellent products (OK, technically it's three products since BizTalk 2006 is part of this launch as well; and yes, we will probably talk a bit about it as well).

Visit the official Fort Worth .NET Users Group website for more information.

How fast does my page load?

CorySmith — Thu, 10 Nov 2005 19:11:00 GMT

Several questions arise surrounding performance with web applications. Many times it's difficult to tell exactly where the bottleneck in the loading time of the page may be. Is it the page size, page generation duration, image sizes, number of images, connections to other locations, DNS delays, bandwidth bottleneck or whatever? Some one was asking about a particular site and why it appeared to be running so slow. I had my suspicion, but wanted to have some way to “prove“ what I suspected. I decided to do some searching for a tool that would help outline what is really happening so they could narrow down the problem spots. What I found is a pretty interesting tool and it appears to be not only web based, but free!

Gomez - Internet Performance Management Intelligence - Free Web Site Performance Test

Just type in the full URI for the page in question and review the results. It reports on the following:

DNS lookup time
Connection time
First-byte download time
Content download time
redirect time for the HTML
all page objects of your selected URL.

Not a bad tool considering it's completely free. ;-)

Anyone know of any other such tools?

.NET 2.0 Redistributable... where to get?

CorySmith — Fri, 28 Oct 2005 07:03:00 GMT

If your looking for the redists, you can find *all* of them here. (Of course, they are in the SDK directory when you install VS... but just in case.)

Marko asked me via IM if I knew where to find the redists. I told him to look in the SDK folder (was guessing, since I'm still installing at the moment.) He found them there... but then sent me a link here, in which that guy was notified by this guy who then directs people to here. So obviously it's a question asked by a few people... thus the reason why it's now here. ;-)

It... is... aaaallllliiiiiiiiiiiiive!

CorySmith — Thu, 27 Oct 2005 20:06:00 GMT

If you haven't heard the news, Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 (meaning Microsoft Visual Basic 2005) and Microsoft SQL Server 2005 has been officially released to manufacturing... which mean...

If you are an MSDN Universal (or rather were... and now a Visual Studio 2005 of some edition plus MSDN Premium) subscriber, you can download it today! Yes, that means right at this very moment. What are you still reading this for... go to http://msdn.microsoft.com/subscriptions/. You still here... <slap>... go there and start downloading. Let's bring the MSDN download server to it's knees. <EVIL LAUGHTER ENSUES>

Oh yeah, if you were an MSDN Universal subscriber and ignored the email about selecting one of the Team System edition products... your loss and don't be complaining about how all you see is the trial version of Team System. Start downloading Professional and go digging through your email to correct the issues. ;-)

Thanks to everyone at Microsoft on the product development teams for a job well done and to Mr. Somasegar for leading the teams and getting this thing shipped.

Enjoy!

Hmmm... Free copy of VistaDB 2.1!

CorySmith — Thu, 27 Oct 2005 17:39:00 GMT

... and all I need to do is place the following blurb on my blog:

VistaDB 2.1 database for .NET has been released
This 2.1 update includes over 60 improvements, including new support for .NET 2.0 and Visual Studio .NET 2005. VistaDB is a small-footprint, embedded SQL database alternative to Jet/Access, MSDE and SQL Server Express 2005 that enables developers to build .NET 1.1 and .NET 2.0 applications. Features SQL-92 support, small 500KB embedded footprint, free 2-User VistaDB Server for remote TCP/IP data access, royalty free distribution for both embedded and server, Copy 'n Go! deployment, managed ADO.NET Provider, data management and data migration tools. Free trial is available for download.
- Learn more about VistaDB
- Repost this to your blog and receive a FREE copy of VistaDB 2.1!

Consider me signed up! ;-)

OK, seriously, I haven't had a chance to play with this, but in reading through some if it's features it offers several that are unique. The most important being that it's truly Xcopy deployable. SQL Mobile would the excellent for this type of deployment, except it's licensing is reduced to only allowing deployment on pocket devices and Tablet PC's. So the next step up would be SQL Express... which requires an installation on top of the framework. Not a bad solution, however, it would be nice if I could just provide an application that could be completely Xcopy deployed. I'll have to give this product a serious look through... and being free sure removes any barrier to giving it a deep look see.

(In all honesty though, if SQL Mobile didn't have it's licensing restrictions, I'd probably have a different opinion... So to Microsoft... hint... hint... )

Oh yeah... if you have a blog... go get yours by using the link above. ;-)