lyon-smith.org

I recently had the need/desire to dynamically generate some code in .NET.  It's not something you tend to do a lot unless you are creating a compiler, so it was an interesting experience.  In the end it didn't solve my problem, but it was educational none-the-less. First I'll describe the scenario of the problem I was trying to solve ...

I have to blog about this before I do anything else.  I just found out that if you specify a configSection in your .exe.config file it must come as the first element in the configuration section!  I had done this:<?xml version=''1.0'' encoding=''utf-8'' ?> <configuration> <startup> <supportedRuntime ...

I don't write many Outlook macros primarily because I don't have time to learn the CDO document model.  But once upon a time I wrote a couple of macros that have become invaluable to me ever since.  Some background.  I process my e-mail roughly like this: I use Outlook rules to filter out e-mail that is sent to most of ...

Here's another useful VS macro.  When I write code there are always weird edge cases that I think of while so I like to liberally sprinkle // TODO: comments around.  When you do this though you should always put in your alias and the date.  That way someone who comes across your comment knows who to ask for further details, or ...

I love msbuild.  Before it came along I was a big nant user, but now I'm an msbuild convert.  It's not perfect, but it sure is better than batch files.  It really, really needs embeddable code snippets, and a debugger but once it has those it will totally rock.  If you are writing a program that needs to run ''scripts'' ...

I just spent an annoying amount of time figuring out how to do this because sadly our documentation is so bad.  So I'm going to blog it quickly so that I at least have a record of what I did and hopefully someone else will find it useful.  Thanks go to Tim Murphy for providing about the only decent blog on this subject. First ...

One of the most useful macros I ever wrote in VS was but a single line.  All it does is insert a GUID at the current selection point.  It was so useful I wrote it twice; once to insert lowercase and once to insert uppercase GUIDs.  Here it is:Imports System Imports EnvDTE Imports EnvDTE80 Imports System.Diagnostics Public ...

As you know if you are a Visual Studio Team System user, we provide two types of profilers with the product; sampling and trace.  If you are not familiar with this feature of VSTS, one place to start are the excellent TechNotes under the Development heading on this page.  The trace profiler works by rewriting the method bodies of ...

One of the things that you often want to do when creating a Windows Installer using WiX is to uninstall the existing product before installing the new one.  This is referred to as doing a ''major upgrade''.  The way to pull this off is to add the following WiX snippet to your .wxs file:<Wix ...