Monday May 21, 2012
This is the cross platform IDE for developing Mono on Linux, Windows and Max OS X. New features include code formatting, improved C# code completion and (experimental) Source Analysis. See the full list of what's new and improved.
I had problems with the previous version (2.8) running on my Linux Mint box (it hung!), so it will be interesting to see if that's now working. If you've not tried it before and want to try C# on Linux, Mac or even Windows, install it and give it a go. It's a rather nice IDE that runs a dream on Windows.
Sunday May 20, 2012
Just a quick note, if you want a decompiler for .NET, JetBrains, publishers of Resharper, my favorite Visual Studio add-in utility have released theirs and it's called dotPeek at version 1.0 and it's free.
My own experience of decompilers are that you think they're useful but in reality, not that much. A nice to have in some fairly rare cases. I have heard of them being used to try and regenerate lost source code.
I have lost source code before, a single file back in the bad old days before version control systems existed (on 8 bit micros!) and it was a bit of a nightmare. Fortunately though, because I had done the work fairly recently I was able to recreate it within a day. Mind you it was a very long day and not an experience not to be repeated but I was very lucky.
Saturday May 19, 2012
Automating Windows applications (Win32, Winforms, WPF,Silverlight and even Java SWT) is not something you need to do everyday but it can be very useful. It's not easy though. Issues such as timing, identifying Windows (and in Windows every control is a Window i.e. has it's own message loop) etc make it sometimes quite frustrating.
White is a toolkit for .NET that lets you do automation programming; ie clicking buttons, setting text in edit boxes etc. I'm preparing a tutorial on how to use it which should be out tomorrow or the day after.
Strangely the code has been moved to Google code, though the main documentation is currently on Codeplex at the link given. (Later note) Actually it's easiest to download from Github.
Friday May 18, 2012
There's nothing quite as handy as having a big library of code samples. Launched in 2009, Microsoft's All-in-One Code Framework has over 3,500 samples of code for all aspects of Microsoft's technologies from ASP.NET, html5, Winforms, WPF and more recently Windows 8 etc.
These aren't just short samples but working code, projects etc. For instance for Windows forms there are currently 242 samples. These include splash screens, DataGridView demo, image slideshow, interprocess communication etc. Just select the sample and have it downloaded to the folder you specify when you first run All-In-One. The downloaded files include project files plus a description page in html.
There's also a "Sample of the Day"; recent ones have included Display time on ASP.NET server side, WPF Listbox validation and C++ Windows Shell context menu handler, so there's plenty of variety. And if that's not enough, you can even put in requests for samples! Excellent.
