Tools

So I've finally managed to get fxCop officially adopted on a work project (*). Better yet, thanks to an upgrade, we now are using the Ultimate Edition of Visual Studio: I no longer have to use the command line of fxCop . Instead, It's integrated right into the build.

Of course, no improvement goes unpunished.

Roy Osherove has posted a list of things he installs on any new developer machine, including links so you can find out more.

If you ever find yourself using AzMan and can't work out how to add a new operation (as I did today), here's the key (and hard to Google) step.

The ISerializable blog post "The difference between continuous Integration tools and automated build tools" has a good breakdown of the difference - one does the build, the other triggers the build.

At the moment, I'm using TeamCity and NAnt for my builds.

Here's a subtlety of NHibernate mapping that I ran into this morning.

When you map a one-to-many relationship as a list, you can have null values in that list when loaded.

At their recent developer conference, Google gave the delegates a sneak peek of their new product, Google Wave. You can see the Google Wave demonstrations for yourself on YouTube.

Disclaimer: I've not used Google Wave at all, just viewed the release video and read a bunch of other commentaries. My comments below (in italics) are based on their developer early access preview and things are likely to change markedly between now and release.

So, what is Google Wave?

I'm coming up to speed with Gendarme, the open source assembly inspector.

Mostly, the tool seems to deliver on its promise, but I'm having a problem with a false positive.

The EnsureLocalDisposalRule rule is intended to flag situations where Disposable instances aren't properly cleaned up.

I’ve started looking into Oslo, the new model driven architecture from Microsoft.

In many ways, Oslo looks promising – finally, a way to move to a higher level of abstraction. If they do this right, they really could achieve their goal of improving developer productivity 10x.

What I’ve seen so far does raise some interesting questions though …

Lutz Roeder, author of the Reflector tool, has sent out an email burst with this announcement:

"After more than eight years of working on .NET Reflector, I have decided it is time to move on and explore some new opportunities."

Roeder's Reflector software is one of my must have tools - a key instrument that helps me to answer "Why does it do that?" and "Is it possible to ...".

It's likely that the return address on his email burst is unmonitored, but just in case, I wrote back to say:

I'm always looking to do things better tomorrow that I did yesterday - and to that end, I find other peoples "Best Practices" posts endlessly valuable ... not that I always agree with them of course, but I do enjoy being challenged to think.

Go read NUnit Best Practices, a fairly recent post by Scott White.

How many of Scott's 7 NUnit practices do you agree with? How many do you follow? Why?

After using both RSS Owl and RSS Bandit for simply ages, I've finally found an RSS Reader that works the way that I want - and it was under my nose the whole time.

Mozilla Thunderbird.

That's right, Thunderbird. The RSS Reading experience is dead simple - you subscribe to a bunch of feeds, and they show up as mail folders. New postings appear as new messages. Couldn't be easier or simpler.

The current download of StyleCop doesn't include any documentation that tells you what standards it enforces.

Over the weekend I spent more time with StyleCop, bringing a representative sample of code in line with its recommendations.

Fridays intuition has proven correct - there are a handful of rules that I'll disable, but most of the rules are useful, leading towards more maintainable code.

One frustration I found was the lack of a commandline version - the standard download includes Visual Studio and MSBuild integrations, but no commandline version.

So, I've written one.

As soon as I've finished testing it, will post here as a download with source.

Lutz Roeder's .NET Reflector has to be one of the most useful tools in my bag of tricks - the ability to spelunk into the depths of an assembly to answer a tricky question has value beyond words.

Better yet, Reflector has a plug-in architecture, allowing others to extend the tool in new directions.