Contents tagged with General Software Development

  • Comparing XML Files with Beyond Compare 3...Brilliant

    I bought a new laptop and was loading it with the tools I use every day. When it came to installing one of my favorites, Beyond Compare 2, I thought I'd check the Scooter web site to see if I had the latest version. I was happy to see they now had a version 3 with plenty of new features. I immediately reached for my credit card to buy a license. Folks, this is honestly one of the tools I don't even hesitate paying for...it's that good, and that invaluable. I don't work for them, I'm just a very happy customer.

  • Introducing Birch Cove Software

    A few days into a 3 week vacation with my family I received a call that I wasn't surprised to receive. The company where I had worked for 6 years was downsizing and my position, along with many others in our department, was eliminated. Since downsizing (or worse) was happening across the entire sector, I didn't take it personally. In fact, I took it as a sign that I should try something different. A friend recently said that "getting laid off is one of the best thing that ever happened to him", and I hope to look back and say the same some day.

  • Red Gate will take over development of Lutz Roeder's .NET Reflector

    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.

  • MSBuild 3.5 just made my day

    While doing some troubleshooting on a project I needed to manually copy some debug assemblies around after every build. But there were a lot of them, and whenever I need to do something repeatedly I try automate it with a script of some sort...because I'm lazy of course. There are a lot of choices today for a little quick and dirty script like this, Batch files, VBScript, Powershell, NAnt, but I thought I'd give MSBuild a try because I figured it would be the least amount of hassle, since moving files around is one of it's main duties during a build. The script was simple to write, but I hit a snag...the destination files were read only, and the copy errored out. MSBuild 2.0's copy task doesn't have an option to overwrite read only files. But MSBuild 3.5 does, so I learned a couple of tricks.