Paraffin 3.7 – Support for WiX 4.0

After a couple of requests, I added WiX 4.0 support to my Paraffin project, the file harvester, which makes maintaining installer projects a lot easier. As part of this update, I moved the code to Visual Studio 2017 and moved to .NET Framework 4.6.2. I nearly went down the path of making a .NET Core version of…

New WintellectPowerShell Version with Visual Studio 2017 Support

We have a new version of Visual Studio coming soon so I did the work to update my WintellectPowerShell module to support it. And, what a huge adventure that turned out to be! I will discuss why its support for Visual Studio 2017 was hard a bit later in this blog entry. For those of…

Get Function Keys By Default with Parallels and a MacBook Pro Touch Bar

Having purchased a 15 inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar recently, I’ve been having a good time seeing how that Touch Bar can be used. With applications that know about the Touch Bar, it is an interesting UI approach. But with many macOS applications not having full Touch Bar support, I’ll reserve full judgment until…

FastFileFinder Now 30 Percent Faster—How Fast Can You Make It?

A while ago I whipped up a small utility to search for filenames at the command line. I noticed recently that it did not handle long filenames over 260 (MAX_PATH) characters. Having a few spare minutes I updated FastFileFinder to use the Win32 API directly as the .NET Framework Directory methods do not have that…

WintellectPowerShell Now on the PowerShell Gallery

Getting and installing modules is easier than ever with the PowerShell Gallery and PowerShellGet. Instead of downloading and extracting files into your PowerShell modules directory, a simple call to Install-Module takes care of everything for you. Today I’ve published my WintellectPowerShell module. Now you can install and get started setting up Visual Studio to access…

Fixing MacBook Pro Windows 10 In Place Upgrade Issues

On my production machine, my Apple MacBook Pro, I did an in place upgrade from Windows 8.1 to Windows 10. I ran into a couple of bumps and got them figured out so I thought I’d post this for others seeing the same problems. That way when combined with the power of Greyskull (AKA internet…

Turn off the Attach Security Warning Dialog in Visual Studio

How many clicks has this dialog eaten out of your life? The idea for the warning is good because, you know, SECURITY. However, if you’re developing web apps or anything running in IIS, this gets old by the thousandth time you click the Attach button. It’s easy to turn off with an undocumented registry key.…

Free 1.5 Hour Video: Writing Roslyn Analyzers and Code Fixes

My deep abiding love of Roslyn continues! I just published a new video Writing Roslyn Analyzers and Code Fixes up at WintellectNOW: https://www.wintellectnow.com/Videos/Watch?videoId=writing-roslyn-analyzers-and-code-fixes. My goal was to take you from zero knowledge of Roslyn to writing a real world analyzer and code fix in 1.5 hours. This video covers everything from using the Syntax Visualizer…

Analyzing Control Flow with Roslyn

The other day my co-worker Jeffrey Richter and I were discussing my latest infatuation, Roslyn analyzers. As we bounced around a few ideas one came to the forefront; every catch block should throw. This is not a hard and fast rule, but eating an exception, especially accidentally, has caused more bugs in .NET than we…

Learn Roslyn at the Microsoft MVP Virtual Conference

Mark your calendars for May 14-15, 2015 for the free 2015 Microsoft MVP Virtual Conference. This is a Microsoft sponsored conference where Microsoft Valuable Professionals (MVPs) will be presenting five different tracks for world wide consumption: IT Pro, Developer, Consumer, LATAM (Spanish), and Brazil (Portuguese). Obviously, I’ll be in the Developer track, but I’m really…