Ernst Kuschke

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Find Old Versions of Software
Ever need to do this? Here 's a useful site that keeps them for you. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

Posted by Ernst Kuschke | with no comments

BizTalk 2006: The Recoverable Interchange
The processing of messages in BizTalk is referred to as an "interchange". With BizTalk 2004, when receiving messages on a Receive Location that contain multiple submessages, an error in any of the submessages will result in the entire interchange being suspended. (This means that all of the resulting submessages are suspended). An example is the processing of a flat-file: having it split into multiple XML documents by the Receive Pipeline. If any of the resulting XML documents have an error (like...

Posted by Ernst Kuschke | 3 comment(s)

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Tip: Make your solutions load faster
Visual Studio 2005 consumes some serious memory, and sometimes takes quite a while to load big solutions. To speed up the load of a solution, minimize Visual Studio to the taskbar while the solution loads. It just works. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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Killing connections to a SQL Server Database
Here's a handy little script for killing open connections to a database in SQL Server: USE [master] GO IF EXISTS ( SELECT [name] FROM sys.databases WHERE [name] = N 'YOUR_DATABASE_NAME') BEGIN DECLARE @spidstr VARCHAR (8000) DECLARE @ConnKilled SMALLINT SET @ConnKilled = 0 SET @spidstr = '' IF DB_ID ( 'YOUR_DATABASE_NAME' ) < 4 BEGIN PRINT 'Connections to system databases cannot be killed' RETURN END SELECT @spidstr = COALESCE (@spidstr, ',' ) + 'kill ' + CONVERT ( VARCHAR , spid) + '; ' FROM...

Posted by Ernst Kuschke | with no comments

Using the J# runtime libraries
The J# redistributable libraries, vjslib.dll, contains amongst others two areas of functionality that is very commonly looked for: Support for Large Numbers Zip compression support I often see people using third party tools just because no one knows about this - in fact, these are so often needed that I think it would make sense for Microsoft to include them in the .NET Framework. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

Posted by Ernst Kuschke | 1 comment(s)

To use quotes in NAnt buildfiles
Quotes in nant build scripts can be represented by &quot; , as in: <exec program= "tools\fxcop\fxcopcmd.exe" commandline= "/p: &quot; my tools\fxcop\ccnet.fxcop &quot; /o: &quot; build\my results\ccnet-fxcop.xml &quot; " failonerror= "false" /> This is often necessary when you have spaces in your paths, like above. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

Posted by Ernst Kuschke | 3 comment(s)

A few Tips for Visual Studio 2005
Using the new dataview, you can drill down and inspect datastructures' run-time values at debug-time. It's quite annoying when you need to switch back and forth between your code and the dataview. To make the view transparent (allowing you to see your code!), hold down Ctrl. Visual Studio 2005 will contain per-thread breakpoint functionality, which means you can specify on which thread a specific breakpoint must be hit. Useful! Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick...

Posted by Ernst Kuschke | 1 comment(s)

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Tip of the week: IDEF
A client of ours has had all the business processes (related to a project we're doing for them) done in UML. This was done recently by the various business process owners, and ready for sign-off. A glance at the UML gave the impression that it the analysis was very thorough. We spent almost the entire week with the client re-engineering these processes due to the number of holes in the designs. The tool that helped us find these holes is the process-modeling methodology called IDEF (specifically...

Posted by Ernst Kuschke | with no comments

Data Mapping Application Block
It's just a preview, but sounds very promising! It seems to be an object-to-relational (OR) mapper library, configurable via XML and features caching, transactions, and more. From the site: “The Data Mapper is a layer of software that separates the in-memory objects from the database. Its responsibility is to transfer data between the two ends to isolate them from each other. With Data Mapper the in-memory objects needn’t know even that there’s a database present; they need no SQL...

Posted by Ernst Kuschke | 5 comment(s)

Unit Testing with VS2005
Some lifecycle concepts have been seriously considered by the whidbey teams. Here's a quick walkthrough to illustrate the way Unit Testing is handled in VS2005. I create a (highly complex) mathematical class as follows: To automatically create a test for the Add method, right-click, and select Create Tests. You'll see the Test Menu: Select what you want to do, and click Generate. The Test generated for my class looks as follows (note the NUnit-like attributes): [TestMethod()] public void AddTest...

Posted by Ernst Kuschke | 11 comment(s)

Peeking into IL from Visual Studio
I've had to compare IL generated by the C# compiler to that of the VB.NET compiler recently. To do so most efficiently from Visual Studio, I added ildasm.exe and ilasm.exe to Visual Studio's list of External Tools . It makes flipping back and forth from source-code to IL a breeze. I set it up ILASM as follows: The default path for ilasm is C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v1.1.4322\ilasm.exe . I like using the output window to view IL assembler-results (warnings and errors!). My ILDASM setup looks...

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NAnt scripting: emailing the build log
When creating our NAnt scripts one of the first issues I ran into was sending a copy of the buildlog to certain email addresses. What I innitially did was to create a NAnt target called sendmail that would attach the buildlog file and mail it to a list of interested parties. After building my assemblies, I would call this target, which looked like this: < target name ="sendmail"> < mail from =“NAnt@myCompany.com“ tolist =“${distribution_list}“ subject ="${mailsubject...

Posted by Ernst Kuschke | 8 comment(s)

Developing ASP.NET apps with VS2003
There are ups and downs to developing web applications with VS2003, as Visual Studio 'web projects'. It's nice to step through your ASP.NET code, add watches, and drag webcontrols onto webforms. However, o nce you try doing continuous integration and unit testing you'll start speaking in languages apart from the .NET ones! It doesn't work. [ASP.NET Tip] - Fritz Onion shows you how to develop ASP.NET applications with VS2003, without all the pains associated with web-projects: develop them as class...

Posted by Ernst Kuschke | 1 comment(s)

A New Build-environment
Whilst Microsoft has provided us with one of the coolest development tools ever, called Visual Studio .NET, they have never really provided anything in the areas of source control, build and release. This is addressed by the release of their Visual Studio 2005 Team System , due next year. We are currently doing a project that is tremendously huge. Although most of it's obesity could have been avoided by better design, we are where we are, and we need to build and ship what we have. So over the last...

Posted by Ernst Kuschke | 6 comment(s)

Colorblind Web Page Filter
Ever wondered how accessible your webpage is to... let's say.... people who are colourblind? Now you can find out by using the cool Colorblind Web Page Filter . Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

Posted by Ernst Kuschke | 5 comment(s)

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