Community Blogs

I was recently asked to review a licensing solution – CryptoLicensing for .NET (disclosure – I was paid for my time , the time it took to review it, but had only committed to doing a fair and balanced review). After reading Oren’s post a while ago about how he couldn’t find a decent licensing solution to the point of making his own, I was sure that this one will fall out as well over some technicality. Typemock also has a home-grown solution for licensing, and while searching the web about a year ago I was hard pressed to find a decent licensing component for .NET that didn’t suck in terms of usability or features. So, all the signs pointed to the possibility that this would be yet another one of those licensing schemes that are just not good...

Looks like the Code Formatter plugin for Live Writer has been updated. Gonna give it a try. Read More...

I caught a couple of blog posts from here and here that had to make me do a double take. I’m not one for relaying gossip, but this information seems to be legit. As of April 1, 2008 SharePoint Designer will be free. Now if you go to the “official” site there’s no mention of it however I’m hearing through the grapevine it’s true. The official site even has a “buy it today” option, so you might want to hold off on that. Of course April 1st is always a fun time for me and the blog-o-sphere so the fact this announcement is targeted for that particular date has to make you think. Like I said, every indication I have says it’s true. It’s a wee bit confusing because David McNamee mentioned it in Michael Ganotti's Webcast saying it would be available...

Just a quick tip on anyone setting up the latest version of Windows Live Writer (14.0.8064.206) and publishing to http://weblogs.asp.net . By default, when you run the wizard it’ll stumble over the the autodetection so you’ll have to select your blog provider manually. Here’s the default selection when choosing Community Server: Note the remote posting URL. The default value is incorrect (probably because weblogs.asp.net is a subdomain). Entering http://weblogs.asp.net/blogs/metablog.ashx will result in an error and you might be left scratching your head why you can’t publish your blog. The proper URL should be http://weblogs.asp.net/metablog.ashx like so: Just thought I would pass this tip along in case anyone was having problems getting connected...

I'm ditching my PDA (currently a BlackBerry Curve) and my laptop for note taking and going retro. For the past few years I've been taking notes in various digital media. Back when I had my Palm, I would do handwritten notes (sometimes trying to fight that silly PalmScript recognizer). When I had a tablet available, I would do the same in OneNote and recently I just fill up OneNote pages with notes and scribbles (all typed in). The biggest issue I have with digital note taking is, while it's fast on data entry, it's horrible in capturing intent and nuances of information. Recently I got inspired by a concept Mike Rhodes seems to have earmarked back in 2007 called " sketchnotes ". It's the idea of capturing hand-written...

I'm a command line app junkie as I love working with it. I guess it's my DOS/Linux roots but I find things go faster when you're not dealing with a GUI and a mouse. Command line tools like NAnt and MSBuild have all sorts of options and syntax. Some of it discoverable, some of it not so much. NAnt for example will try to find a buildfile to run and execute it. It also will display the name and version of the app (which is useful in build logs so you know what's going on). There are other things like trying to find out how to run a command line tool. For example if you type "nant /?" you'll get this: NAnt 0.86 (Build 0.86.3075.0; nightly; 02/06/2008) Copyright (C) 2001-2008 Gerry Shaw http://nant.sourceforge.net Unknown...

I'm presenting a talk around Terrarium development at the Edmonton .NET User Group on September 25th. The talk is focused on upgrading a legacy app (1.1) to 2.0 (and beyond to 3.5 eventually), building and running your own Terrarium (complete with man-eating critters), and the future roadmap. Here's the session abstract: Terrarium was created by members of the .NET Framework team in the .NET Framework 1.0 timeframe and was used initially as an internal test application. In Terrarium, you can create herbivores, carnivores, or plants and then introduce them into a peer-to-peer, networked ecosystem where they complete for survival. Terrarium demonstrates some of the features of the .NET Framework, including Windows Forms integration with...

My Tools site is down so here is a temporary (and minimal) page with download links to the tools. I need to work on it to add descriptions and more, but if you know what you want to get, this should be enough for now . Soon, tools.osherove.com will redirect to this page. Read More...

This is a pretty interesting approach to a deadlock detector: It uses sos   (son of strike debugger) and automates it under the covers and parses its output to discover runtime deadlocks on processes. At the comments there is a reference to something similar . Unlike the upcoming Typemock racer (which should be out around mid august), these tools only find deadlocks that occur at runtime, but will not provoke the code into creating deadlocks. that is, the possibility of finding a deadlock that only happens about once in two days in an application using these tools is just about … every couple of days, since it is using the standard process of the application (as far as I can see from the code). The idea in racer is that it will run all...

Sasha and Alon have released an open source project called " Non Paged CLR Host " which has the following benefits(quoted): Applications will benefit from no paging during normal operation.   Even if other applications are actively allocating memory, allocations performed under the non-paged CLR host will be locked into physical memory. No paging will occur when the application is idle , providing a great benefit to low-latency processes such as GUI applications (even if the user has fallen asleep in front of the monitor).  The normal working set management scheme employed by Windows will not affect processes running under the non-paged CLR host. That's Pretty cool. I've had the pleasure of working on a project with...