Development With A Dot : Tools

New Version of Visual NHibernate

Ricardo Peres — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 10:36:00 GMT

A new version was released: 2.0.9.1018. Some of my suggestions have been implemented, more to come (I hope!). You can contribute by giving feedback at the forum, which is located here.

Read the change log here and download it here.

Visual NHibernate

Ricardo Peres — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 08:45:00 GMT

The guys at Slyce Software have released Visual NHibernate Beta. It is still far from final, but it looks promising. You can get it from here, there are also some screenshots.

So far, I have noticed some things missing. There is a discussion going on at the nhusers mailing list about it, but here are my 50 cents, in no particular order:

Support for additional databases, starting with Oracle
Optional support for generating partial classes
Inclusion of the Serializable attribute
Support for lazy loading of relational properties
Allow specifying non-public setters
Configuration of id generators
Removal of mapping table from the model, in many-to-many relationships, when there are no additional attributes in the relation
Generating composite keys in a new class, instead of having multiple properties

More news in the next days.

New Downloads

Ricardo Peres — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 10:14:00 GMT

Service Pack 3 for SQL Server 2005 has been recently released. You can get it here. Note that now there are different versions depending on what SQL Server you are using (Express, Express with Advanced Services, etc).

The Books Online has also been updated for December 2008, and here is the place to get it.

Announcing Isolator for Sharepoint : Unit testing for sharepoint made easier (and a free license!)

Ricardo Peres — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 09:21:00 GMT

Typemock are offering their new product for unit testing SharePoint called Isolator For SharePoint, for a special introduction price. it is the only tool that allows you to unit test SharePoint without a SharePoint server. To learn more click here.

The first 50 bloggers who blog this text in their blog and tell us about it, will get a Full Isolator license, Free. for rules and info click here.

Configuration Items List 2

Ricardo Peres — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 10:35:00 GMT

I've made changes to the list of software I regularly use. Here is the updated version;

Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Team Suite SP1
Microsoft Enterprise Library 4.1 and Untiy 1.2 (logging, database access, exception handling, inversion of control and dependency injection and validation)
JetBrains TeamCity 4.0.2 (continuous integration server)
Oracle Data Access Components 11.1.0.6.21 for Oracle 11g (Oracle database provider)
GhostDoc 2.1.3 (tool for documenting .NET source code)
SDC Tasks Library 2.1.3155.0 (build tasks)

See my previous list at: http://weblogs.asp.net/ricardoperes/archive/2008/08/13/configuration-items-list.aspx

Visual Studio 2008 SP1 is a nice refresh, I particularly like the CSS editing capabilities and I think it is more stable and fast than previous versions. I also like the ability to debug Microsoft source code, it was about time!

In Enterprise Library 4.1 I use Unity a lot. I don't know how it compares to Spring.NET for IoC and dependency injection, but I like what I have. However, I don't like the fact that I must add by hand (or by using an extension) the Policy Injection configuration, I think it should do it out of the box, and I also don't like the lifetime manager mechanism... I will post about these in the near future.

Regarding TeamCity, I think it is much better than CruiseControl.NET, mostly because I don't have to edit by hand the XML configuration files, but I think it is also more powerful, and has direct integration with NUnit and FxCop, as well as with MSBuild.

I just noticed that ODAC comes with session state providers, profile providers and membership providers, which can replace Microsoft's versions, which only work with SQL Server. Nice!

SDC Tasks is simply great! It comes with much more tasks that MSBuildTasks, for example. It has virtually everything I need for my builds, for example:

Ability to get input from the user
Ability to send e-mails
Database access
Registry access
Integration with IIS
JavaScript trimming
Active Directory access
and so on...

Finally GhostDoc allows documenting my source code, including inserting comments from inherited classes and interfaces.

Continuous Integration and Static Code Analysis

Ricardo Peres — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 15:05:00 GMT

I'm about to start a new project where we'll be using JetBrain's TeamCity continuous integration. The list of features is superior to CruiseControl.NET, and it seems to have gathered a greater community of users, so I decided to give it a try. There are numerous pages which describe its configuration and features, so I will not go through that here, whenever I have something to say about it, I'll write a post.

Meanwhile, Patrick Smacchia of NDepend has been very kind and offered me a professional license of NDepend! I am very excited about this tool, but have only barely scratched it's surface, so when I have more news, I'll let you know.

I guess I'll have to update my Configuration Items List post once again... oh, well...