August 2008 - Posts
I just received a newsletter from Red Gate, and nestled in the headlines was this interesting tidbit. If you haven't heard of .NET Reflector, it's one of my favorites, and I encourage you to check this invaluable tool out. It's what you reach for when you have to know what's going on inside that assembly but don't have the source.
Here's the announcement on Red Gate's site: http://www.simple-talk.com/opinion/opinion-pieces/the-future-of-reflector-/
James Moore who is the general manager of .NET Developer Tools at Red Gate states:
“I think we can provide a level of resources that will move the tool forward in a big way. The first thing we are doing is continuing to offer the software to the community for free downloading. The second thing is giving our product management and usability teams the task of going out into the community to get suggestions on how we can make this amazing tool even better."
I'm hopeful that Red Gate won't mess anything up. I've been using their ANTS profiler for years, and more recently discovered their wonderful SQL tools, and they are all excellent. For now they've promised to continue to give it away for free, but you know there will need to be some way to make money coming.
I've been working on a presentation for our next User Group meeting on Continuous Integration, and wanted to set up a local Subversion server. Of course I wanted to use the latest and greatest versions of everything. So I've been checking back daily for the appearance of the installer for Subversion 1.5.1 for Windows. Setup-Subversion-1.5.1.en-us.msi showed up on August 15, 2008.
You can find it on the Subversion download site When you couple this with the latest TortoiseSVN you are cookin' with gas!
I found this CoDe Magazine article by Rick Strahl very helpful for setting things up initially. Setting Up and Running Subversion and Tortoise SVN with Visual Studio and .NET
This was sort of an accidental discovery, I'm not the first to stumble on it, but it doesn't seem to be widely known. A colleague of mine asked me about an interesting behavior he noticed after switching to Visual Studio 2008. He was still targeting the .NET 2.0 framework, but noticed the automatic property feature worked.
Automatic properties are where you can just say
public string SomeProperty { get; set; }
The compiler provides the backing field and implements the get and set for you. It's a very nice shorthand syntax for a common pattern. We were all under the impression that it was a new C# 3.0 language feature and could only be used if you targeted version 3.5 of the .NET Framework. After searching around for why it was still working on a .NET 2.0 app, I found many who verified what we were seeing. Indeed it does work, because it's a compiler feature, and 2008 uses the latest compiler even if you are targeting 2.0. Cool.
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