01 April 2004

FxCop 1.30  FxCop used to be good, but now it’s even better. I ran my MSI app through it and it picked up a few (stupid) missed calls to SupressFinialize in Dispose functions, some functions I wasn’t calling any more, and a whole slew of other problems and suggestions that I can now deal with. The performance rules interest me the most though since I’m currently examining .NET performance for a work thing. There aren’t that many rules at the moment but in a few versions I can see there being enough of those rules to cover most of the basic performance errors you can make in .NET to really give new developers a head start into spotting where their code can be improved in a way that profilers never seem to do. Of course the other rules at the moment already provide that for a whole bunch of other issues, but I’m all performance obsessed at the moment while we prove that we can do a pretty heavyweight processing project in .NET and don’t need C++. What other blogs are saying about this post. 11:19:59 PM    comment []  trackback []

Useful Embedded XP software One of the hard things I find using embedded XP is taking third party software that is packaged in an MSI file and turning it into components. Because of this I’ve been working on a small utility to take a MSI file and create both a .REG file and extract the files that it contains. Tonight I finished the first pass on the .REG exporter and it will now create a file with most of the data in the Registry table and write it in a way that can be imported into the component designed. There are a few missing features still as I’m not doing anything about properties in the registry data ([WindowsFolder] and the like) and I don’t support appending to the end of registry values or deleting values. I’m going to run it on some of the more problematic installers that my last project needed and see what it makes of them. When I’m happy with the registry support I’ll post a copy here for people to use if they need it before I get started on the files. What other blogs are saying about this post. 10:14:59 PM    comment []  trackback []

It's April so it must be time to try Linux again OK, the April thing has nothing to do with it but due to two pieces of software I am now firmly back in the playing with Linux camp. The first piece of software is Virtual PC which promised to work well enough to enable me to install Linux under it. The second software is of course Mono, which is getting dangerously close to the version 1 release. So how did it go? I can’t run in a resolution about 800x600, but I now have Mandrake and Mono installed. Quite frankly I’m shocked and the fact that it is now (by only a few minutes) April 1st has me wondering if this is a massive prank by somebody. It’s been a few years since I’ve used Linux and so the fact that the install worked first time is pretty great. I have no doubt that it would never support all my various pieces of hardware that I use day to day and so there’s no chance of me dropping XP as my OS of choice until, at a guess, around 2007 or 8, but for now it’s very usable for the playing I wish to do. Oh yes, I installed all of this for a reason. Time to see if I can get away with being able to say “Runs on all platforms that support Mono” for all my apps now… What other blogs are saying about this post. 12:44:57 AM    comment []  trackback []

© Copyright 2004 Jon Shute.