Developer News

Why is Windows 7 Beta so Good? -And Why You

Why is Windows 7 Beta so Good? -And Why You are Less Likely to Care!
I, like many others, download Windows 7 Beta build 7000 on the day it hit MSDN after reading about its availability from Bink.nu. It came as an ISO so was easy to build into a virtual machine however on my home laptop I’ve partitioned my HDD and had XP in one partition and Vista in the other. Vista rarely gets to see the light of day simple because it is always doing something with the hard-disk! Checking! Scanning! Indexing! All driving me nuts as it slows down the performance of my machine. So

Get your hands on Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0
Well this may be a late news on the .NET community, but I have been following a lot on this area of Technology recently. Here is the news for me, Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 are the next generation developer tools we are working on. An early preview, a CTP of VS2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 , is now available for download. To learn more about the CTP or to provide feedback go to the CTP feedback page You may ask what’s with this CTP, it is a good way for the users to take a preview o

Windows 7 Beta arrives, minimum specs revealed
Barmy Steve Ballmer, sometime monkey dancer and full time Microsoft top dog now that Bill Gates has gone, has surprised us all by informing the world that January 13th will not be Windows 7 day as predicted. The good news is that Windows 7 day will be on the 9th January instead. Yes, Ballmer has confirmed that an almost feature complete Beta version of Windows 7 will be made available for public download for the first time tomorrow. Talking during his keynote address at the opening of CES in Las Vegas, Ballmer revealed that software developers can get their hands on the Windows 7 Beta…

TestDriven.Net 2.13: Support for Silverlight 2.0 Beta 1

I’ve just uploaded a new version of TestDriven.Net with support for Silverlight 2.0 Beta 1. Microsoft have certainly kept me on my toes as there have been lots of changes since Silverlight 1.1. I’m sorry it has taken a while!

At the moment you’re limited to running individual public methods (ad-hoc tests). If you need to run a suite of tests I recommend you use this in conjunction with the Silverlight Testing Framework that was released at MIX. Jeff Wilcox has posted a detailed tutorial that shows how to use the framework here. When running your tests using ‘Test With > Silverlight’, bear in mind that you’re simply executing the test method and any test attributes (TestInitialize etc.) will be ignored.

I’ve also included an application called ‘agx.exe’ that lets you run console applications using the Silverlight/CoreCLR from the command line. After you’ve installed TestDriven.Net you will find this standalone application here: \Program Files\TestDriven.NET 2.0\agx.exe. This is simply an application that I use for my own testing purposes that I thought other people might find useful.

You can download the new version of TestDriven.Net from here.

NCoverExplorer… v1.4.0

Syndicated from Kiwidude’s Geek Spot

I’ve had this "quietly available" on the download page for a few weeks to gain feedback on any issues and with no known issues outstanding it seems appropriate to more publicly announce it.

A big change in NCoverExplorer 1.4.0 is that it is no longer published under the GPL license. I made this change for a number of reasons; amongst which was the concern that a number of companies have of deploying GPL based tools into their development process. This roadblock has been removed and should no longer prevent your companies from using this toolset.

My original choice of GPL was based on using the ICSharpCode 1.x texteditor control. I have now dropped that component in favour of using the superior (but commercial) Actipro SyntaxEditor control instead. The improvements are not only in stability and features but also visual as you can see below in the code highlighting screenshot. A splitter window is available as also shown.

So why should you upgrade to NCoverExplorer 1.4?

This release is less about adding new features (although there are some to be found) and more about stabilisation for the future. The core model code has been rewritten and better tested. There have been countless code coverage corner cases (say that five times in a row!) arise that should be better catered for. Better performance for .NET 2.0 users, lower resource usage, better error handling and some minor gui quirks addressed.

Some of the "internal" changes have spilled over externally. For instance the configuration file format used by NCoverExplorer.Console with /c has changed to support new features, although I have retained legacy compatibility for those who choose not to upgrade their build scripts immediately.

What about the new features? Well, the ones I did squeeze in were…

• Support for the //pm (profiling a process by name) argument in NCover 1.5.8;
• Copy command in the source code text area via right-click;
• Print preview command in the File menu;
• /fc argument for NCoverExplorer.Console to fail a build if the combined total coverage of all assemblies does not meet the minimum specified. This was the original behaviour of the /f command before it was changed to fail if any individual assembly does not meet the minimum;
• Coverage exclusions now support the ‘?’ wildcard and multiple ‘*’ wildcards within the expression.
• Report xml contains a "totalSeqPoints" attribute as requested for developers writing alternate xsl reports that need to calculate the excluded code at each level;
• Update the NAnt/MSBuild task dlls to support the latest changes;
• Redesigned the options dialog as shown below;