Rants Tagged with “Tools”
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Its been an exciting day here at the Wildermuth compound. I noticed that the old setup for my SQL Server Monitor project was broken (mostly dependencies were wrong), so I figured I'd just open it up and tweak a couple of settings and move along with my day. D'oh!
Seems that I'd lost the source to that project. I use Subversion to save my sources locally but that project pre-dated that source control. What to do? Well, I rebuilt it using Reflector to give me the old code. Then I rebuild the setup using Visual Studio 2008's Setup projects (which suspiciously don't seem like they've changed since their inception in Visual Studio 2002!).
Since I had to rebuild the source, I thought it was time to fix the one nagging 'bug' in the code. Not really a bug since it was built without UAC in mind, it required it be to run as Admin on UAC enabled machines (since it mucks with the services and such). I thought I was going to have to dig into some arcane Win32 stuff to get it to work, but interestingly all it needed was a manifest file:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<asmv1:assembly manifestVersion="1.0"
xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1"
xmlns:asmv1="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1"
xmlns:asmv2="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v2"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
<assemblyIdentity version="1.0.0.0"
name="MyApplication.app"/>
<trustInfo xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v2">
<security>
<requestedPrivileges xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v3">
<requestedExecutionLevel level="requireAdministrator"
uiAccess="false" />
<!--<requestedExecutionLevel level="asInvoker" uiAccess="false" />-->
</requestedPrivileges>
</security>
</trustInfo>
</asmv1:assembly>
The trick was adding the 'requireAdminstrator' as a requestedExecutionLevel. Once the manifest was added as an embedded resource, Vista/2008 recognizes it needs some admin privledges and should ask the user when necessary.
Go get the new setup file if you want to be my beta tester! Please email me at shawn (at) wildermuth.com if you find any bugs.
I usually prefer to avoid just link posts, but since I have gotten this question a lot lately in my class and at user group talks, I thought i'd share. A couple of months ago Scott Hanselman convinced Microsoft to allow him to release something called RockScroll:
This tool is an addin for Visual Studio to be a scrollbar replacement for most code windows (though it doesn't work for XML files for some reason). It does some nifty things for me:
- Gives me a visual layout of the file instead of hoping that I am scrolling to the right place. Just click on the preview and it moves there.
- Bookmarks and breakpoints are marked as red and blue dots on the preview so I can find that breakpoint I set really quickly.
- Edited lines are highlighted so I can find the last place I edited.
As Scott says in his blog, its strictly "It works on my machine" but i've been running with it since it's release with zero problems and no slow-downs. Its now a must on all my development machines!
You can download it from Scott's blog:
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/IntroducingRockScroll.aspx
Interestingly, Microsoft has released a new tool that they've used for years internally to analyze code in their code base. Its been informally called "StyleCop" and differs from FxCop in that it analyzes source code, not compiled binaries.
If you are interested in consistency in your code base, you should take a look!
While I am happy for Mark Russinovich and his people, I hope this doesn't mean the end to free access to SysInternals. What do you think?
Brendon Schwartz (of Atlanta .NET Regular Guys fame) asked me a question today about the old tried and true Depends tool that we used in the COM days. He wondered if there were a .NET equivalent. After soon fierce googling I found Depends.NET. Its nothing fancy, but it works great if you need to find out what assemblies are missing...
Enjoy
I spent much of the day without Internet access today. My cable provider went into the tank for most of the day. I got sick of testing it over and over so I wrote this little application to continually try and ping an internet address and when it succeeds it pops up a dialog (on top of other windows) to let me know! It's nothing special, but if you think you might need it (don't want until your internet is down), grab it here:
http://wildermuth.com/downloads/internetready.zip
Initial Interface:
Alert Interface:
Thanks to Shawn Van Ness, he pointed me at this great utility that is helping me clean up some bad MSI's that are not letting me get WinFX installed correctly. Check it out.
FoxIt is a FREE alternative to Adobe's Acrobat Reader (yeah, I know its free too). And I have to say...fast...fast...fast...as well as not annoying and trying to install bunch of other junk:
http://www.download.com/Foxit-PDF-Reader/3000-2079_4-10365812.html
I have so many SQL Server instances on my local machine others in my home office that I wanted one place to start and stop them all. I liked the start-stop functionality in the SQL Server agent, but I have MSDE instances and SQL Server 2005 instances running too, so a single place to do it all from an icon tray was my goal. So here I've created a simple .NET 2.0 application. I would have done it with 1.1 to make it more accessible for users, but there were some features I needed in 2.0 to make the app work. So if you have the .NET 2.0 Framework installed, check out this new app to control multiple instances of SQL Server a mouse-click away:
Here's a new little tool I found while looking for a decent battery monitor that stays on the top of all windows. My behemouth laptop gets a paltry one hour of battery, so when I have to run on batteries, I need to keep pretty close tabs on the life. This tool not only looks great, but is accurate and was written with .NET. Take a look if you need a pretty battery monitor.
