September 2006 - Posts

Cool Mailing Lists

I've been subscribed to some of these lists before, and now after a break I am again, and I'm impressed with the overall levels of expertise and the esoteric nature of some of the problems discussed.  These 'forums' are guaranteed to be "Ignore this" free.

 I am currently subscribed to the following lists, which seem to cover .NET development quite well:

ADVANCED-DOTNET
DOTNET-CRL
DOTNET-CX
DOTNET-WINFORMS
DOTNET-WEB

Try them out.  The volumes are by no means excessive 

The Low Down on Polymorphism
The real dirt on polymorphism.
Cool Dev Articles
A link on sadeveloper.net led me to the web site of a web development company.  Two brothers, Chad and Joseph Finsterwald have a really cool list of dev articles there.
doxygen to the rescue

The other day I downloaded nDoc and took it home to play, after a separation from it of a few months.  I don't have internet at home, and was quite disappointed when I discovered that nDoc does not yet cater for version 2.0 of the Framework, and my plans for the evening were derailed.  Apparently this version of nDoc is now in an alpha test phase.

 Some googling revealed doxygen, a similar tool that does work with .NET 2.0.  A quick download and test revealed a quite satisfactory set of HTML documentation, except that it gave me the impression it would generate class diagrams, which it did not.  Still, if you are missing the convenience of nDoc on your .NET 2.0 projects, I'd say doxygen is worth giving a try.

 

ClickOnce Happines

My previous post described a condition of some chaos that was rectified through some good cleanups and restarts.  The ClickOnce Publish Wizard is now doing everything it is supposed to.  Once again, this time just for experimental purposes, I will return to the manual publishing using MageUI.  The reason I am returning there is that when the wizard wasn't working, MageUI gave me even more grief.  I was getting only all kinds of errors from ClickOnce trying to read the manifest file, which I had not touched after generating it with MageUI.

Hopefully my second foray will be more positive, as this is a really cool technology.  I wish I had had it on at least two big projects involving national rollouts. 

ClickOnce Woes

Wow, it's been quite some time since I posted here.  A lot has changed since then: I have a new job, a new notebook, two new housemates, and a totally new source of frustration and stress. 

Now it's the ClickOnce Publish wizard in VS2005.  Now I haven't found many bug reports online, but in just 24 hours I have identified at least two serious defective behaviours with this wizard.  Yesterday, and last night (yes, until late) I could not stop it publishing an extra project in the solution, in addition to the one I want to publish.  Fortunately I can remove it from the solution before publishing1 without affecting the solution, but this just isn't on according to me.  It isn't caused my any interdependencies, because the surplus project is stand-alone.  If I create an exact replica of this project with another name, all is well and it isn't published, so its erroneous publication is linked to the project name or something.

My second gripe is that now, when I publish the app for on and off-line use, suddenly the publisher has stopped including the Start Menu and Add/Remove Program items, for no apparent reason.  I have given up on this lameness and will commence manual publishing using the MageUI tool.  Stay tuned for more...

 

[1] If someone can tell me how to remove the project from the solution in a post-build event I would be obscenely grateful.