Anyone in the DFW area should check out Jeff Gonzalez and Shannon Davis's presentation on CodeSmith.  I have quickly become a huge fan of CodeSmith, and wish I was local to check it out.  Having worked with Jeff before, I'm sure it will be a fantastic presentation.  Plus, Eric will be handing out free copies of CodeSmith.  Sounds like a can't miss to me.

Details here

This seems to be a great addition to NUnit.  After struggling with DB consistancy for unit tests we have implemented something similar, but much more manual.  This seems like an ideal solution to deal with DB consistancy.  The one issue I do see is the ability to fully test transactions without needing to model the code around a RequiresNew attribute, but what a step in the right direction.  Can't wait to take a look, thanks alot!

Check it out here

Was the wife's birthday this weekend, so we took a trip up to Hampton Beach in New Hampshire.  For those not on the East Coast, it's like the beach that time never touched.  There has been little development or fixing up in years, and the arcades are still packed to the hilt with Skee Ball, pac-man, and millipede.  The nostalgia is fantastic, and of course, the seafood is even better.  Oh, and the wife loves the idea that the outlets are right there. 

So after a long weekend of burning my delicate coder skin in the sun, I'm ready to jump back into action.  Had a good idea while basking in the sun this weekend, so there may be a product brewing deep inside iceglue.  Some sequence diagrams and functional requirements are already in the works  :)

A while back I was looking for an app to do some analysis of my blog logs.  I found a little app named 123loganalyzer, and started playing with it.  I ran it probably about 5 times in my 30 day trial and was able to get a good idea of what was going on.  Then, on the 31st day, the app timed out of course.  I debated purcashing it, but decided to start looking again to see whats out there.  I am really surprised at the lack of really any free tools other then awstats. 

So I gave another app a shot, but this time I'm even more impressed.  I've been playing with Surfstats, and really like the app.  And, it's even cheaper then 123.  I might pony up for this in 30 days, or I'm really debating my first whidbey project being an iislog analyzer.

Anyway, none of this is the point of the post.  In going through my logs, something struck me as very surprising.  I was looking at my browser logs, and guess who was not on top?  In fact, guess who wasn't even in the top two.  IE.  I was floored. 

The top browser, and by a decent margin, was mozilla.  In a not so close second is Bloglines.  I still can't believe it as I type this.  So, of course, this peaked my interest.  Off to download firefox.

I played with it for all of about 30 minutes, and am pretty darn impressed.  Only took a couple pages to get used to, and really like the tabbed interface.  This was not the only thing I like about it.  I started looking at the plugins to see what else was out there, and was again impressed with the community that is coming to light here.  My search bar now has options for google, dictionary.com, ebay, as well as some others.  Theres even a plugin that shows the current http headers.  I dig this.

Unfortunatley, though, I already see a couple issues.  And of course they are most noticable on Microsoft sites.  First thing I did when I opened firefox is set my homepage to msdn like I always do, and could tell immediatley the page wasn't 100%.  The question now, will I keep it around.  I really like it, and will use it for some browsing, but I highly doubt I will like having browsing browser options.  I just don't see me having my own little browser war with myself.

I've spent just a little time with b1, and can already see there is a huge amount of changes and updates.  Just huge.  I think I am going to take a sectioned approach to discovering whidbey, and thus picure whidbey.  Initial thoughts :

General Coding Changes
Windows Forms Designer Changes
ASP.Net Forms Designer Changes
DB Project changes

Any input on the order would be good, and I'm sure ill find more to look at in these trails.

Remember that view in diagram from PW6?  Well this is where it brings you.  A picture is worth a thousand words.  And yes, adding one in the diagram immediately adds it in code.

Mini image in post, click for large.

Refactoring from the ide...  Also notice View in diagram.  We'll see that soon.

Here are some shots of the intellisense improvements in whidbey.

namespace scoped

class scoped

Whats the local variable name again?

New mode for vss?  Interesting

Heres the add new project dialog.  New checkbox to add to source control. 

Heres the program menus it installs. I wonder if one of those cmd shells is monad?

Saw a link for paint.net so I figured I'd grab it.  Never been a graphics guy so photoshop/jasc type products are like cooking to me, a mystery.  Most of them are pretty expensive mysteries, so I've always gotten away with paint, and a trial or two here or there. 

So far so good.  I can get in and do basic stuff with images pretty easily, but whats more important to me is I got the code too.  So this'll be my new standard and with Picture Whidbey it might get a decent amount of use.  Get it here.

Oh and why I'm blogging tonight.  I should be out watching the purty flashing lights in the sky with my friends and family, but, unfortunatley I can't.  This week I decided I would run off a curb onto some concrete.  Bad decision.  My ankle took the brunt of it, with my wrist and knee as bystanders.  So, no walking around some crowded field to see flashing lights this year. 

Oh another change.  Giving blogjet a try.

After I installed beta1 the first thing I noticed was the sql server 2005 program group.  I poped in, and found 1 icon, Sql Computer Manager.  Although I gone more into it anymore, heres a shot.  I found it interesting to see report server.

[If you dont care about my installation story, the point of the post is the last paragraph]

Let's face it, there's some hype around whidbey.  Unless you live in a van down by the river, you know how this new widget or that new thing will make this 100 year old developer problem just *poof* go away.  Although I don't buy into all of the hype, I am very anxious to start playing with this new set of tools.  I played with the last releases a bit, but no more then I would some fly by night flash game.  But now that beta 1 is here, I think it's time to get my feet wet.

So I start my long journey.  Anxiously awaiting the new release, I get the download started within hours of the release.  Wow, theres lots of stuff here.  I don't want to feel like I missed something, so I just grab it all.  So I set the stop watch and start watching the download meters.  At some point during the night I must have dosed off a missed some of the intense action, but needless to say, by morning it was just about done.  Great,  I got the bits, and lots of them.  D'oh, no image yet. 

Ever install XP on a vpc?  I chose not to do it on the thinkpad since, well, I use it, and did it on my “sandbox” (2.4 celery, 256ram).  I had to set the ram to 128 since, well, this is a sandbox, aka frankenstein box, and only have 256.  Well, a few more exciting hours of progress bar antcipation, XP is all setup. 

So, I go shave now, cause its just been that long since I started the process.  All clean and whatnot, its time to install vs.net.  I mount up the first image, and start it up.  I choose my options (everything but sqlexpress was on by default, I turned on sqlexpress), and started it up.  Guess what comes next?  If you said progress bar anticipation, your correct.  Man this process is slow.

After all that, it's time to copy it to the laptop.  I was hoping it would be a bit smaller, but it's 5.3 gigs, so I plugged in to copy it over.  Another 30 or so minutes of progress bars, and it's time to go.

So now to the point.  People write about whidbey all over.  We have all seen the articles, and they will keep pouring out.  Hey, I may even write one.  But this category is gonna be all about whidbey screenshots.  As I play with whidbey, when I see cool things, I'll snap a shot and post it here.  If you find anything cool, feel free to send it this way and I'll post it up too. 

Thanks Andy Smith for posting a link to this.  A new windows theme ripped form MCE.  I'm really enjoying the facelist to the luna theme.  Think this is a keeper.  Check it out here

Also installed winkey again.  Of course my thinkpad doesnt have a windows key, but thinkpad utils let you re-map a key to windows, so now I am all setup to put all my windows key shortcuts back.  Love the windows+v = vs.net.  And windows+Left minimize current app.  I forgot how handy the app is.  Check out winkey here.

I had no idea.  In fact, thinking back, there is at least twice in my career that this could have helped... alot.  So thank you jaybaz for showing us. 

You can debug release builds.  All you need is the pdb file.  So next time you change that dropdown to release, make sure to turn on debug info.  You dont have to ship it, but keep that pdb in a very special place.

Check out the details here.

It's in beta.  Get it while its hot.  I shyed away from doing too much testing with the alpha releases, but think it might be time to setup a vpc on my thinkpad to play with the beta.  Grab it off msdn.

UPDATE : Don't get it off MSDN.  Get it here.

UPDATE 2 : Well, that site says get it from msdn.  Msdn only shows the march and may previews.  False start?

UPDATE 3 : In a couple days the whole thing is out.  For now, just the express packages.

I'm a week and a half in, and I still dig gmail.. a ton.  There are some things missing, but for what it does, it does it really, really well.

I like :
FAST interface.  In and out faster then outlook any day.
Thread view of emails.  This is fantastic.  No more search for related messages and wait, and wait.
The spam filter is excellent, catching more then the yahoo one did 2 weeks ago.
Keyboard shortcuts.  They did them very well.

I dislike :
Contact's are very lacking.
I want to be able to add any message to an existing thread.

I would also put no client in the dislikes, but I did just find this link on Stefano Demiliani's blog.  Something worth checking out.  I also saw rumors of gmail being availibile in the google API.....  /me drools