Peter's Software House

Pex v0.5 Released

I've blogged about Pex before, wondering when M$ were going to release it to the rest of us (it was only available internally @ M$).

Well they have finally released Pex, you can go and download it here.

It only works in Visual Studio 2008 Professional or higher.

It works on .NET 2.0, but also supports 3.0 and 3.5.

If you are into Unit Testing then this is a must see for you.

I tried Pex out on the samples included in the complete/custom install.

Here is what the results look like:

StyleCop

Ahmed yesterday blogged about the new Microsoft Source Analysis Tool for C#.  So I thought I'd have a look and try it out.  So far, I am pretty impressed by it.  And the fact that they are planning to automatically correct some of the rules will really help a lot.

To test it I ran it on the Data Application Block of the new Enterprise Library 4.0.

As you can see, you just right click on the solution, project or a cs file and the tool runs an analysis and produces the following result:

Apparently there are 200 rules, and you can switch them on or off using the Source Analysis Settings Editor (Settings can be set per project).

It would be great if you could create your own rules and add them to the tool.

Enterprise Library 4.0 released!

This is going to be the big news on Monday.  Yes, Enterprise Library 4.0 (May 2008) has been released yesterday.

Here are the cliff notes from David Hayden's blog:

• Integration with the Unity Application Block - Use the Unity Application Block (Unity) to generate instances of Enterprise Library objects, and inject Enterprise Library object instances into other objects.
• WMI 2.0 Support - Enterprise Library 4.0 takes advantage of the improved features in the .NET WMI 2.0 API.
• Partial Trust Support - Enterprise Library has the Allow Partially-Trusted Caller attribute (APTCA) on all assemblies
• Caching Application Block  - The application block has been refactored to allow developers to replace the CacheManager class with their own implementation if required.
• Cryptography Application Block  - Supports new performance counters, such as Total Hash Comparisons, Total Hash Mismatches, Total Hash Operations, Total Symmetric Decryptions, and Total Symmetric Encryptions.
• Data Access Application Block  - Supports new performance counters, such as Total Commands Executed, Total Commands Failed, Total Connections Opened, and Total Connections Failed.
• Exception Handling Application Block - Logging Handler has a new Boolean property named UseDefaultLogger, and new performance counters, such as Total Exceptions Handlers Executed and Total Exceptions Handled.
• Logging Application Block - Better filtering, much improved Rolling Log File TraceListener, better performance through delayed gathering of context information, support for environment variables in log file names, and the new performance counters are Total Logging Events Raised, Total Trace Listener Entries Written, and Total Trace Operations Started.
• Policy Injection Application Block - Ruleset support on ObjectValidator, and call handlers now have an Order Property to set order in which call handlers are called.
• Security Application Block - New performance counters, such as new counters are Total Authorization Requests, Total Authorization Requests Denied, and Total Security Cache Reads.
• Validation Application Block - Use of multiple rule sets to validate an object.

Microsoft Silverlight Tools Beta 1 for Visual Studio 2008

I just realised that I need to install the Microsoft Silverlight Tools Beta 1 for Visual Studio 2008 to be able to run and create Silverlight 2 applications in Visual Studio 2008.

I realised this when I downloaded a sample app and VS2008 told me that the project type is not supported, which confused me as I have the team system version of VS2008.

First I looked at the .csproj file and saw that it was a SilverlightApplication, which wasn't a surprise but I wanted to be sure.

Then I googled and found that you need to install Microsoft Silverlight Tools Beta 1 for Visual Studio 2008, which I promptly did and now the sample works.

Outlook 2007 Pain

Decided yesterday I needed to install VS2008 on by base machine so that I could do a spike on some new features.  What a shitty idea that turned out to be.  Outlook 2007 decided it didn't want to work anymore.  Outlook would happily start in safe mode, but just would not start normally.  So I tried tracing it, uninstalling all add-ins, used process explorer, searched google, etc...  In the end I uninstalled VS2008, uninstalled Office 2007 then re-installed Office 2007 and whooop there it started working again.    Aaaaargh +/-4hrs of productive time down the drain.  Thank God for VM's otherwise I would have been totally unproductive.