Brenton House

[Cool Tool] WackGet download manager

WackGet Home Page

With WackGet you can select part or all of a web page, hit a hotkey and it will download everything it finds to a user defined download folder.

Windows PowerShell: The product formerly known as Monad and MSH

[via Greg]

Monad (aka MSH) is now known as Windows PowerShell.

p.s. You can find the MSDN Windows PowerShell Blog here.

Aaron Stebner points to a CodeGuru article on Visual Studio 2005 IDE Extensibility

[via Aaron Stebner’s Weblog]

The article by Vijay Mehta covers:

• Macros
• Add-Ins
• Packages

Remove a RootKit... Go to Jail.

[via Michael K. Campbell’s Blog]

Apparently under proposed changes to the DMCA, you might be facing a 10 years of hard time if you attempt to remove copyright protection. 

<snip>

Likewise, any user attempting to remove that rootkit on their own would be violating a law packing 10 years of punishment - whether they succeeded or not. (i.e. just TRYING to remove copyright protection would be a crime, whether you succeeded or not - and in the case of these rootkits, you wouldn't be allowed to even DISCUSS removing them from your machine without technically breaking the law.)

</snip>

Sharing a Strong Name Key File Across Projects

[via .Net Security Blog]

By default when you add a Strong Name Key to your project, it copies it locally.  Using the “Add as Link” option on the Add Existing Item dialog will allow you to use a shared key with a relative path.

Jason Haley finds a couple more interesting debugging blogs

[via Jason Haley’s Blog]

SteveJS - Bug Babble
JimGries - Gooey Bugs

Kirk Allen Evans talks about sorting XML with System.Xml.XPath.XPathExpression

[via Kirk Allen Evan’s Blog]

<snip>

This question came up twice this week, so I thought it warranted a quick post.  If you want to retrieve a sorted list of nodes from an XmlDocument instance, there are a couple ways to do this.  You can use XSLT, or you can write your own sorting algorithm.  The .NET Framework provides capability to provide sort orders to the result of an xpath query through the System.Xml.XPath.XPathExpression::AddSort method.  Here is a simplistic demo:

   20       static void Main( string[] args )

   21       {

   22 

   23          XmlDocument doc = new XmlDocument();

   24          doc.LoadXml( "<a><b>5</b><b>3</b><b>6</b><b>1</b></a>" );

   25          XPathNavigator nav = doc.CreateNavigator();

   26          string path = "/a/b";

   27          XPathExpression expression = nav.Compile( path );

   28          expression.AddSort( "text()", XmlSortOrder.Ascending, XmlCaseOrder.None, string.Empty, XmlDataType.Number );

   29          XPathNodeIterator iterator = nav.Select( expression );

   30          while( iterator.MoveNext() )

   31          {

   32             Console.WriteLine( iterator.Current.Value );

   33          }

   34       }

 

Dan Wahlin maintains an excellent resource site, XML For ASP.NET, to find quick HowTo's on various XML technologies.

</snip>

BCL Team posts four part series on Installing a Managed Service with a Custom Name

Installing a Managed Service with a Custom Name (Part 1 of 4)
Installing a Managed Service with a Custom Name (Part 2 of 4)
Installing a Managed Service with a Custom Name (Part 3 of 4)
Installing a Managed Service with a Custom Name (Part 4 of 4)

Felice Pollano is integrating a debugger in reflector

[Via Mike Stall’s .NET Debugging Blog]

Felice Pollano is building a debugger that leverages Reflector and MDBG.  Check out his screenshot below.  I will  be watching this for when he releases the binaries for this!

<snip>

This post just to share an idea and a work in progress. Leveraging Reflector and MDBG ( a complete managed debugger provided by Microsoft as a sample ) i'm writing a tool that allow to debug without *any* debug infos and use the Reflector disassembler to provide more readable infos on the code. Very useful if we want to dig inside the framework functions.
I cannot yet post the source and the binary, cause the stuff is very poor until now, but let's have a screenshot:


Please notice that:

• This is not a Reflector AddIn, but a standalone application using Reflector
• The debugging API is used wrapped by MDBG classes
• The actual version need a too extensive uses of manual commands in the shell windows
• Some times I have some deadlock ( this is the reason I cannot yet post the code )
• IL Istruction pointer is sometimes MAPPING_APPROXIMATE ( this is a flag returned by the debugger core itself, not my error ) standing for "I cannot say exactly wich il instruction I'm executing at this IP" ( or at least this is actually my interpretation
• The upper view is IL only, but I guess I will manage to have a mixed one ( Disassembled - IL )
• When a process is attached, all assemblies were loades in the reflector assembly tree
• When a breakpoint is detected, the proper function is automatically showed in the reflector disassembler view and in the IL view.
• Of course, I used Composite UI Application Block to organize the application.
  

</snip>

Less MSIerables - Utility for extracting contents of MSI files

I found a nice utility for extracting the contents of an MSI file.  Very useful!

Less MSIérables: A tool to Extract the contents of an .msi File
New Version of MSI File Extraction & Viewer Utility