Now THIS looks interesting. A company called Altiris has released a product called Altiris SVS (Software Virtualization Solution ). It’s officially version 2.0, though I never heard about version 1.0.
In a nutshell, SVS lets you install applications in to virtualized file and registry sandbox. As far as the app knows, it’s installing into the regular file system, but SVS redirects its requests into a separate area on disk (a layer, in SVS parlance). Layers can be deactivated, in which case the app effectively disappears from your Windows install. Reactivate the layer, and the app reappears. It’s actually kind of a trip. Layers can also be rolled back to a stable state, much like a snapshot in VMWare. And even cooler, layers can be moved between machines, providing nearly instant application installs.
Coolest of all is that Altiris is providing a free personal version, so it’s easy and free to try. I’ve installed it (in VMWare, naturally) and did some very basic testing, and so far it works as advertised. Much more testing to do, though.
Obviously my biggest concern is the effect on Windows stability – SVS is operating at a very low level (basically a Windows file system filter driver, as I understand it). But if it proves stable…well, maybe I’ll finally be able to install all that Microsoft beta software on my production machine instead of in VMs. :)
There’s a review over on the PCMag, as well as a link to download the personal version.
Frequently while navigating code in VS2005, I want to go to the definition of the type of a variable. For example, say you're looking at a line of code like this:
...
aVariable = DoSomethingThatReturnsOneOfThese();...
And you want to jump to the source for the type of aVariable (that is, if
aVariable is of type
SomeClass, you want to jump the source for
SomeClass). As far as I can see, Visual Studio doesn't give you a simple command that does that navigation. So here's a simple macro that does it.
Sub GoToVariableType()
DTE.ExecuteCommand("Edit.GoToDefinition")
DTE.ActiveDocument.Selection.WordLeft()
DTE.ExecuteCommand("Edit.GoToDefinition")
End Sub
Trivial but effective, and it saves me a couple of keystrokes. I map this macro to CTRL-F12 (a shortcut which as far as I can tell is only used by C++ projects).
Note that this only works if you don't declare multiple variables in one declaration statement. For example, it works with declarations like this:
SomeClass aVariable;but not this:
SomeClass aVariable, anotherVariable;
I recently had to investigate how to create satellite resource assemblies for assemblies that are strongly named. Some of the information was surprisingly poorly documented, and required some experimentation to figure out, so I'm posting the results in the hope it might save other people some time.
Here's what I learned:
- Satellite assemblies for strong named assemblies must be strong named.
OK, not that surprising.
- Satellite assemblies for strong named assemblies must be signed with the same key as the main assembly.
This is actually a bit of a pain for my company, because we use localization partners that in the past have been able to localize the product pretty much independently from us. With our .NET code, we'll have to sign the final satellite assemblies. Fortunately, the localizers can use delay signing with skip verification to do all of their development and testing, and we just need to do the final signing.
- By default, satellite assemblies must have the same version number as the main assembly. You can use the SatelliteContractVersionAttribute to enable the main assembly to be versioned while still maintainng compatibility with existing satellite assemblies (thanks to Joe for pointing out this atttribute).