Blogs|Dec 6, 2009

How I Use OneNote

When I posted Tools We Use, there were several comments, as well as many emails asking me how I used OneNote for debugging and development. Yes, I was the one who wrote “The greatest piece of software ever written. I’ve done more debugging and development with OneNote than anything else.” Having been a proponent for…
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wintellect-blogs|Nov 30, 2009

Tools We Use

Inside Wintellect, we’ve been having a big email chain about all the tools all the technical folks use. Of course, we all use Visual Studio, TFS, and have read Hanselman’s phenomenal Tools List, but our question was what are the tools each of us used on a daily basis to solve real world problems and…
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Blogs|Nov 23, 2009

PowerShell Script for Setting VS 2010 Symbol Paths

Edit (July 7, 2010): Get the latest version of this script here. A while ago, I wrote a PowerShell script that sets up the _NT_SYMBOL_PATH environment variable as well as Visual Studio 2008 so all the debuggers or tools that access symbols you use to shared the same symbol cache. Numerous people said they found…
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Blogs|Nov 16, 2009

Fixing a Nasty Windows 7 + Mac Pro Sleep and Hibernation Problem

As I’ve written before, Windows 7 and Mac Pros are made for each other. Except when the Mac Pro doesn’t want to wake up from sleep or restore from hibernation. That’s one scary problem and I thought I’d share my debugging notes on how I diagnosed the problem. As I am feeling generous on this…
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Blogs|Nov 14, 2009

WiX Projects vs. TFS 2010 Team Build

As I mentioned before, I’m in the process of moving my life over to TFS 2010 Beta 2. I’m using the excellent WiX 3.5 Beta that plugs into Visual Studio 2010 to create my setup and I had a developer build working like a dream. Things got a little more exciting when I created my…
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visual-studio-alm-tfs-and-scrum|Nov 8, 2009

TFS 2010 Build Number and Assembly File Versions: Completely In Sync with Only MSBuild 4.0

Edit: 09/11/2011: This entry still describes how the build numbers work, but I’ve updated the files and shown how to incorporate these changes into .CSPROJ and .VCXPROJ files, Read the follow on blog entries, https://training.atmosera.com/CS/blogs/jrobbins/archive/2011/09/05/tfs-2010-build-numbers-file-versions-from-inside-your-c-and-c-projects.aspx and https://training.atmosera.com/CS/blogs/jrobbins/archive/2011/09/11/more-on-tfs-2010-build-numbers-inside-your-projects.aspx.  Obviously, based on all the web links out there, keeping your TFS 2008 build number and your assembly…
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Blogs|Oct 23, 2009

VS 2010 Beta 2 Concurrency Visualizer Profiling In Depth First Look

One of the most important technologies used at Microsoft is Event Tracing for Windows (ETW), especially inside Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2. There’s a small problem with ETW. It’s beyond wonderful for the Windows team at Microsoft, but for just about everyone else, it’s not so hot. Don’t get me wrong, ETW is an…
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Blogs|Oct 19, 2009

VS 2010 Beta 2 Concurrency Resource Profiling In Depth First Look

Nearly everyone reading this is using a machine with multiple cores. With a basic laptop containing a dual core CPU and your average desktop with a four core CPU, we have processing power our computing ancestors could only dream about. Most of us developers are writing multithreaded applications to take advantage of that power, but…
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wintellect-blogs|Oct 19, 2009

VS 2010 Beta 2 Sampling and Instrumentation Profiling In Depth First Look

While some teams solve their performance problems by throwing bigger hardware at the problem, many of us really do care about creating fast code. Visual Studio 2008 Team Developer Edition and above has had a great profiler that I’ve used to solve many performance problems but Visual 2010 moves it into the realm of excellent…
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wintellect-blogs|Oct 19, 2009

VS 2010 Beta 2 Code Analysis In-Depth First Look

Code Analysis is one of those great tools that people don’t run nearly enough. I have screamed repeatedly, “Never do anything at run time you can do at compile time.” The best time to catch the Design Guidelines, security, and performance violations is at build time. Code Analysis and its standalone twin, FxCop, have been…
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wintellect-blogs|Oct 19, 2009

VS 2010 Beta 2 IntelliTrace In-Depth First Look

After getting a fresh copy of Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2, I was dying to see the amazing IntelliTrace feature. You know IntelliTrace as Historical Debugging, but consider HD as the code name. No matter what the marketing people call it, IntelliTrace is the single most important feature in the Visual Studio 2010 release. The…
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wintellect-blogs|Oct 19, 2009

My VS 2010 Beta 2 Install Experience

While I was hoping that VS 2010 would just install itself as soon as I downloaded the bits, they haven’t quite gotten that feature working just yet. I guess the team had to leave themselves something to do in the next version. I grabbed the new Ultimate edition as that replaces the Team Suite. The…
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