Archives
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[Tools] GhostDoc
Another plugin for VisualStudio which has been around for a while, helps you write code documentation for your c# classes. This is the summary from Roland Weigelt's blog about his tool:
GhostDoc is a free add-in for Visual Studio that automatically generates XML documentation comments for C#. Either by using existing documentation inherited from base classes or implemented interfaces, or by deducing comments from name and type of e.g. methods, properties or parameters.
Just right click the code and select "Document This" from the popup menu:
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[MSBuild][Tools] MSBuildShellExtension - Nifty Tool for Builders
This little project from CodePlex is quite useful for those of you who are responsible for the Build process, Team Build, CruiseControl.NET, NANT, etc. This is the project description from their website on CodePlex:
MSBuild shell extension gives you what you've always wanted: A way of cleaning, building and rebuilding your .net projects from the explorer without needing to open Visual Studio 2005 or the Visual Studio 2005 Command Prompt.
It looks like this:
and when you run it, it builds the project or solution in a command window and displays the error/warnings dialog similar to the one in VisualStudio. Nice!
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[Team System] TFS 2008 - Better Build Support, But Good Enough?
I picked up the blog post written by Buck Hodges today about some of the new features related to Build in TFS 2008. I'm glad to see CI built into the product and better control of the build process as well as better support for editing the build steps. Not that I fear editing some XML, but GUI support is always welcome as long as you can do some 80% of what you normally need to do in that interface.
The build support in TFS 2005 is, compared to some other build servers out there, not top notch. When we started a version 2 of a project just recently, I moved our whole build process to CruiseControl.NET. It took me a day or so to get the basic structure of 10+ solutions (and CI projects) to build and deploy. The same stuff took me days and days to set up in TFS. So now we're building and deploying wcf services, generating data contracts from schemas, generating service proxies from those services and even generating service proxy documentation with reflection. Everything controlled by Cruise Control. And I like cctray :)
It looks like MS is trying hard to step up to the features offered by solutions like CC.NET, but I think it will take some real effort to make developers used to CC, NUNIT and NANT to make the final move.