I needed to change a bunch of project references such that they referenced a different location so that I could provide a solution to a 3rd party for a review. The idea of going thru 20 some projects and removing and re-adding the references was not appealing, so much that I thought about writing an application. I've learned my lesson though, and decided to Google to see if something was already written, and came across Cool Commands. Cool Commands was written by Gaston Milano of Deklarit. It's a very good plug-in, it just doesn't have much documentation, and since the tool is free, I'm not complaining. Install I was unsure how to install the plug-in, as there is no documentation, other then to unzip and run the setup.bat from a VS command prompt. - Download Cool Commands from this Direct download link
- UnZip - I unzipped to %MyDocuments%\Visual Studio 2005\AddIns\CoolCommands. I would suggest unzipping to a permenant location, and not a temp folder.
- Open up VS 2005 command prompt (you must run this as an administrator)
- Navigate to where you unzipped Cool Commands and run Setup.bat.
- The step where devenv /setup is run, took about 1 minute to run on my computer, so you should expect this.
- Start up VS 2005 and load a project to test it out.
- Review this blog post for a good overview.
Summary While commands does not have a find and replace reference, which is what I exactly needed, the global remove and add reference was close enough. Also, all the extra features more then made of for the lack of an exact solution. Tempting fate, I decided to try installing Cool Commands for VS 2008. I copied cool commands to by Addins folder under 2008 and ran the setup from a VS 2008 command prompt, which succeeded without error. However, non of the options are available in the context menu, so it looks like it needs to be updated for VS 2008. References
I was doing some Google searches for more information on Linq and SqlCe 3.5 this morning. While I knew you could use the SqlMetal command line utility to get Linq to Sql Support for SqlCe 3.5, I made an incorrect assumption that Linq to Sql was available on the compact framework. For the love of god, could Microsoft please release a Compact Framework builder, akin to platform builder for Windows CE. For smart phones and other off the shelf devices, keep an official CF release, but for those of us writing applications bundle withed devices, let us determine what we need, and do not need in the compact framework.
Anyway, during my search, I came across Dan Vanderboom's blog. Dave is a Windows Mobile developer and shares some of the same pain that I do. He has alot of good information, and is currently working on a enterprise manager like application for SqlCe running on devices, but will not require active sync.
Thanks to Dave, I found 2 new applications for my smart phone.
- Task Manager - The name is somewhat deceiving, as it is allot more then just a task manager. You can view processes, window handles, device drivers, edit the registry, view network stats and more.
- WiFiFoFum - War driving application for the Pocket PC.
While searching for WSS 3.0 SP1 I came across a download for some SharePoint templates. I am impressed by the list at least, and if they work as good as they sound, they could replace some existing systems someday. I found a site that has allot of the templates installed and available for demo. Server Admin Templates:
Server admin templates are created as site definitions, providing tighter integration and enhanced functionality within the Windows SharePoint Services platform. They will require a server administrator to install. If you do not have Central Server Admin rights, you can still install the site admin templates (see second list below) in the sites/workspaces that you own or administrate. - Absence Request and Vacation Schedule Management
- Help Desk
- Budgeting and Tracking Multiple Projects
- Inventory Tracking
- Bug Database
- IT Team Workspace
- Call Center
- Job Requisition and Interview Management
- Change Request Management
- Knowledge Base
- Compliance Process Support Site
- Lending Library
- Contacts Management
- Physical Asset Tracking and Management
- Document Library and Review
- Project Tracking Workspace
- Event Planning
- Room and Equipment Reservations
- Expense Reimbursement and Approval Site
- Sales Lead Pipeline
Site Admin Templates:Site admin templates are easy for site administrators to install in a template gallery without requiring server administration access. - Board of Directors
- Employee Training Scheduling and Materials
- Business Performance Rating
- Equity Research
- Case Management for Government Agencies
- Integrated Marketing Campaign Tracking
- Classroom Management
- Manufacturing Process Management
- Clinical Trial Initiation and Management
- New Store Opening
- Competitive Analysis Site
- Product and Marketing Requirements Planning
- Discussion Database
- Request for Proposal
- Disputed Invoice Management
- Sports League
- Employee Activities Site
- Team Work Site
- Employee Self-Service Benefits
- Timecard Management
Let this be my first post in my new Windows CE category. I have a feeling I will be writing more stuff about WinCE in the coming months. I wanted to jot down some notes from a couple of articles I read over at OpenNetCF for future review. Most of the high level concepts I already knew, but it's nice to get some details once in a while. Data Caching - No performance gain in keeping the data connection open for the life of an application.
- Cache reads are two orders of magnitude faster then a database read. As the article points out, this is interesting due to the fact that the database, and cached data were both stored in RAM.
- Several of the reader comments were interesting
- The first time a SqlCE Connection is opened, the database is loaded into shared memory
- One option is to have a connection opened for the life of the application, but not to use it, this is just to keep the engine loaded. Then open/close connections in your DAL as you normally would. This was recommended by Steve Lasker, a member of the SQL CE dev team. Steve also points out that reusing a command object and changing the text code hurt more then help, as you can't take advantage of query plans. Reusing a command object can sometimes help with the garbage collector.
- Another reader provided a example where it looks like he is doing an index scan and getting faster results then directly querying the database. It's hard to tell without running the sample code.
Garbage Collector - GC suspends all threads while it performs necessary actions, such as freeing and moving memory. Frequent GC's can have an adverse affect on performance.
- Remote performance monitor, which I blogged about before, is a valuable tool. This article provides a good example of how to interpret some of the numbers.
- Don't fear the GC, and take the time to understand what the numbers in remote performance monitor mean.
I'm also in search of a decent MVC and IoC framework for Windows CE. I'll probably be posting more on this later.
I jumped back into some compact framework development this weekend, and it was the first time since I had installed VS 2008 RTM. I went to connect to one of my CE devices via Visual Studio 2005, and was unable to connect. I also tried the remote performance monitor power toy. I finally went to check on what version of the CoreCon files I had installed, and noticed right away that there date modified was 11/7/2007. I coped these latest versions over to my CE device, and was able to connect again.
Damon Payne put up his goals for 2008 and I decided to post my own. This is the first time I've ever written down goals for a new year, so we'll see how well I actually follow thru on them. I guess that's a goal in and of itself, to report back on my progress throughout the year and write something up on December 31 2008.
Programming, Architecture and Professional Development
- Continue to blog, increasing the quality of my posts (Work in Progress)
- Read at least one book on programming and/or architecture. Apply what I learn to projects I am working on and blog about this. (Need to identify books)
- Start working on one or more personal projects I have been kicking around. The main purpose of these projects is to apply learnings from numerous resources (articles, blogs, books etc), as well as try out new techniques/technologies (IoC, Asp.Net MVC, Linq, MS Sync Runtime) and tools (NDepend, VS Team System). (Work in Progress, need to setup proper home development environment)
- Present at one Madison .Net User Group meeting, most likely on one of the above, or on a project from work. (Identify possible topics)
Investing
- Learn the fundamentals of long term investing (Started)
- Put in the proper time to research new investments (Work in Progress)
Personal Development
- Continue with my studies of Martial Arts, and improve
- Continue playing, and improve at Roller Hockey
- Start learning Japanese
Stuff on the Periphery
- Purchase a Katana and take classes on how to use it
I don't know, it may be too much, but only time will tell. Thankfully, there is allot of overlap, and I've some of the 2008 goals were "goals" from 2007.
Today's task, a somewhat detailed code analysis of one of our Windows CE projects. In addition to reviewing from a lead architect point of view (design and implementation), I also needed to take a look at general coding practices. For this I turned to the Code Analysis tool in Visual Studio, and NDepend. I had remembered reading about NDepend on Scott's blog, and went back there to re-read his post. I highly recommend it, as it's a great quick start and introduction to NDepend. Scott also has a pod cast available, and the the NDepend web site has links to several video tutorials showing how to use it. One thing I found lacking, was there were no support forums on the NDepend web site. I had a couple of issues getting my Compact Framework application to be property recognized by NDepend. The main issue, was NDepend was trying to use the full framework version of System.Data instead of the Compact Framework version. I noticed that there was an option when selecting assemblies to resolved missing ones (well, some it let me, others it didn't), and figured the resolved location was stored in the project configuration file. So I opened it up in note pad and sure enough, there were all the directory paths. I removed all of the paths that were added by default, and added my own paths to my project. I also added paths to the SQL CE 3.5 directory, as well as the location of the compact framework dlls (See update below). Unfortunately I still had issues with NDpend detecting multiple dlls (System.Data and System.Windows.Forms) with the same name. I decided to remove the path statements for everything except my project. This resulted in warning about not being able to resolve dependencies, but the analysis completed. There is allot of information presented, almost to the point of information overload. I highly recommend printing out and reviewing the NDepend placemat as a quick reference. I concentrated primarily on the metrics, which use NDepend's Code Query Language to identify possible problems. I found myself viewing all of the queries to figure out what they were looking at. The documentation of the queries is excellent, and each one includes a link to the NDepend web site which defines the metric is pretty good detail. I am quite impressed with the amount of information that NDepend gave me about my project. There were/are a few usability issues, but they can be overcome. I hope that I can continue to find time to make use of this excellent tool. I spent some time watching the video tutorials, and they were very helpful. I've been trying to get a side project started at home to try out all the tools, techniques, patterns, etc that I don't have time for at work, and this will definitely find it's way onto my to do list. I think it will be very interesting to use this from the beginning and see how the different metrics change as I build out my project. Update: - 1/2/2008 - After watching the videos, I discovered that when you are setting up your project in VisualNDepend, there is a screen that lest you add/remove directories in the application. This is much easier then editing the project file manually like I was initially doing.
Other Links:
Yesterday, a co-worker of mine passed on a link for the Microsoft Sync Runtime, suggesting that we may be able to leverage it in the future in order to meet some requirements we have on our project. Microsoft Sync Framework is a comprehensive synchronization platform that enables collaboration and offline access for applications, services and devices. It features technologies and tools that enable roaming, sharing, and taking data offline. Using Microsoft Sync Framework, developers can build sync ecosystems that integrate any application, with any data from any store using any protocol over any network. Reading thru the initial article, I was quite impressed, but it left out a key piece of information, how does the sync runtime work over the Internet. Not just the internet, but also any decent corporate network were clients do not have direct database access. I made my way to an overview of the Sync Services for ADO.Net, which is what I would be most interested in (although syncing file systems has an interesting appeal as well), and they clearly showed the Internet cloud, but not really how the sync framework worked with it. I actually had to dig into the documentation, and finally found some details on how to get this to work on the Internet. If you read towards the bottom of the documentation, you can see that you implement a proxy on a middle tier. On the middle tier, the service inherits from and exposes the same methods as ServerSyncProvider (the abstract class from which DbServerSyncProvider inherits). The methods are then executed by the application code over a direct connection to the server database. The results are routed through the middle tier and back to the client. Basically the middle tier exposes the same interface that the client application would normally use if it could connect directly to the database. There was a link which gives a specific example of setting up a n-Tier environment and provides a good start. However, I could not find exactly what I was looking for, which was an example of using WCF as the transport mechanism. With WCF I could have 1 middle tier service with multiple end points configured, such as a Basic Http for Internet, and TCP for intranet. WCF also adds support for encryption and authentication, which I didn't see called out specifically in the sync runtime. Other items of interest include, how to setup a database for different sync scenarios, and peer to peer synchronization. All in all, the Sync runtime looks like a very promising framework for building disconnected applications. It will require some re-architecting for existing solutions, specifically the data store, but it might be worth it in the long run. I will be sure to post updates if I get a chance to play around with it at all. It is defiantly something that would save me some time on a side project I am hoping to start working on soon.
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