gomasch Development Notes

Have a boolean setting called CallUpgrade and give it a default value of true. When your app starts up, you can do something like:
if (Properties.Settings.Value.CallUpgrade) {
Properties.Settings.Value.Upgrade();
Properties.Settings.Value.CallUpgrade = false;
}

Note: My.Settings.Upgrade doesn't upgrade?

* Solution * After knowing how My.Settings.Upgrade() works, we can find that making exe assembly as strong named assembly is one solution to this problem.

Continuous Integration Server:

TeamCity Professional is slick and nice and distributed and free, but when you exceed its limits (20 build configurations, 3 agents) money has to roll. Really a nice product though.
Hudson is an interesting really free alternative with no artificial restrictions, absolutely simple to setup, also everything configurable through a web gui, yet powerful including distributed builds and a very interesting matrix project type.
(CruiseControl.net gets all the press but it's ugly and manually editing the XML files is just not working for a team; Apache Continuum may rise to an interesting product as well but their lack of basic docs makes me a bit nervous right now; most of the commercial build/integrations servers seem to target the infamous enterprise area and I think smell big money there which shines through).

COM without Registry - Side-by-Side Assemblies in XP

2007-12-13T16:17:00.001+01:00

It's oh so late. I'm discovering registration-free COM!

"How To Build and Service Isolated Applications and Side-by-Side Assemblies for Windows XP"
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms997620.aspx

With Windows XP, the assembly is described by a manifest; the registry is no longer relied upon for storing and accessing the COM activation data.

"Escape DLL Hell Simplify App Deployment with ClickOnce and Registration-Free COM"
http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/05/04/RegFreeCOM/

So finally I can't escape those *** manifests.

Isolated=True in VS2005 already does a bit of the manifest generation work. But for C++ components with custom interfaces (IUnknown instead IDispatch) the manifests may need some patching.

Change dependencyType="install" to dependencyType="preRequisite". Otherwise VS 2005 Setup project still registers the COM dll even if it's set to vsdrfDoNotRegister.
We'd better also mention the proxy-stub-dll. Described here:
Problem: https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=114083
https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/Workaround.aspx?FeedbackID=114083
Solution: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms973913.aspx#rfacomwalk_topic8

keywords: "Unable to cast COM object" isolated registration free COM vsdrfDoNotRegister asmv2:dependencyType="preRequesite" asmv2:dependencyType="install" dependentAssembly comInterfaceProxyStub

Aftermath: (2007-12-14) It does work with .dlls, but cross apartment calls to a side-by-side OCX don't work for me (OCX built with VC++6). I really have all the comInterfaceExternalProxyStub entries in the manifest, but still I get a System.Reflection.TargetException if I call the OCX functions from .Net from a Non-UI thread. If I call the OCX functions via BeginInvoke all is fine.
But since I made the experience that the cross apartment synchronization from COM works notably faster than using BeginInvoke.

XML Serializer & Default Attribute Value

2007-05-24T16:38:00.001+02:00

Old stuff: The .NET XMLSerializer is quite powerful, but not perfectly documented. Hmm.

I found for example the support for default attribute values *is* there and also more or less complete!

What we want: A class with an instance variable serialized to an attribute:

Its Xml-Attribute representation shall only be written into the XML file when the actual value is different to the default one.
Solution: specify default with System.ComponentModel.DefaultValueAttribute
The value shall be restored when reading an xml file even if the value is not present.
Solution: add a default constructor and set the value yourself.

Untested Example:

[Serializable]
[XmlRoot(ElementName="FILE")]
public class Example
{
    [XmlAttribute("filename")]
    [System.ComponentModel.DefaultValueAttribute(FileNameDefault)]
    public string FileName; 

    public const string FileNameDefault = "default.xml";

    public Example()
    {
        FileName = FileNameDefault;
    }
}

Remember: to control what's happening you can also always take a look at the code generated by the XMLSerializer.

.Net Application Settings

2007-01-15T14:05:00.001+01:00

keywords: .net application settings windows forms

it's not new at all but I want to have this somewhere:

call YourNamespace.Properties.Settings.Default.Save() in Form.Closing
see Client Settings FAQ about paths and when to call Upgrade()
see Saving a forms size, but my version looks like this:

    /// <summary>
    /// purpose: helper class to save form size+location with .Net 2.0 application settings
    /// 
    /// usage:
    ///  1. create two settings values e.g.
    ///    -named "Size" of type "System.Drawing.Size" and set a default value
    ///    -named "Location" of type "System.Drawing.Point" and set a default value
    ///  2. call ctor: 
    ///      new SaveFormSizeInSettings(this, "Size", "Location" MyNamespace.Properties.Settings.Default)
    ///      BEFORE InitializeComponent()!!!!
    ///  3. call MyNamespace.Properties.Settings.Default.Save() in form_Closing
    /// </summary>
    public class SaveFormSizeInSettings
    {
        private Form form;
        private System.Configuration.ApplicationSettingsBase settings;
        private string sizeValueName;
        private string locationValueName;

        /// <summary>
        /// ctor
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="form"></param>
        /// <param name="sizeValueName"></param>
        /// <param name="locationValueName"></param>
        /// <param name="settings"></param>
        public SaveFormSizeInSettings(Form form, string sizeValueName, string locationValueName, System.Configuration.ApplicationSettingsBase settings)
        {
            this.form = form;
            this.settings = settings;
            this.sizeValueName = sizeValueName;
            this.locationValueName = locationValueName;

            form.FormClosing += new FormClosingEventHandler(form_FormClosing);
            form.Load += new EventHandler(form_Load);
        }

        void form_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
            if ((null == settings[sizeValueName]) ||
                (null == settings[locationValueName]))
            {    // size or location not yet in settings
                return;
            }

            Size savedSize = (System.Drawing.Size)settings[sizeValueName];
            Point savedLocation = (System.Drawing.Point)settings[locationValueName];

            if (Screen.FromControl(form).Bounds.Contains(new Rectangle(savedLocation, savedSize)))
            {    // fits into current screen
                form.Size = savedSize;
                form.Location = savedLocation;
            }
        }

        void form_FormClosing(object sender, FormClosingEventArgs e)
        {
            //size
            if (form.WindowState == FormWindowState.Normal)
            {
                settings[sizeValueName] = form.Size;
            }
            else
            {
                settings[sizeValueName] = form.RestoreBounds.Size;
            }

            // location
            settings[locationValueName] = form.Location;
        }
    }

Batch: Find And Replace Text In A File

2006-09-25T13:27:00.000+02:00

I needed to write batch file which also has to replace a string in a text file. Do I admit it took me almost 45min to find a solution? Switching to Powershell will probably ease those small scripting tasks, but right now I want as few dependencies in my windows scripts as possible. Which rules out any Perl, Ruby, Python ... you name it. Batch files (.cmd, .bat), Javascript (.js) and VBScript (.vbs) run out of the box at any Windows XP machine and this is what I need. Boy sometimes it takes literally ages to solve such simple tasks. Solutions:

http://www.motobit.com/tips/detpg_replfile/

Microsoft TechNet: How Can I Find and Replace Text in a Text File? :

Const ForReading = 1
Const ForWriting = 2

strFileName = Wscript.Arguments(0)
strOldText = Wscript.Arguments(1)
strNewText = Wscript.Arguments(2)

Set objFSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
Set objFile = objFSO.OpenTextFile(strFileName, ForReading)

strText = objFile.ReadAll
objFile.Close
strNewText = Replace(strText, strOldText, strNewText)

Set objFile = objFSO.OpenTextFile(strFileName, ForWriting)
objFile.WriteLine strNewText
objFile.Close

To use this revised script (which we’ll call replace.vbs) just type a command similar to this from the command prompt:
cscript replace.vbs "C:\Scripts\Text.txt" "Jim " "James "

Visual Studio 2005 C++ code template/snippet add-ins

2006-05-08T13:35:00.000+02:00

CodeWiz (VS6, eVC3) and CodeWiz2 (VS2003) are great free plugins for Microsoft C++ IDEs. They were saving me quite some time when coding C++ in past. The header<->source switching, code templates and paste members features are very just helpful. Now I'm starting with a C++ project under Visual Studio 2005 and I heavily miss these features.

Now I am badly searching for a free C++ add-in for VS 2005 which supports code templates or code snippets. It's just too bad that Visual Studios built-in code snippets are NOT available for C++ ! Unfortunately I didn't find any free alternatives for CodeWiz for VS 2005, just these:

Established Code-Template-Add-Ins for C++ (not free, often with many other features)

CodeSmith (around 500$, the last free CodeSmith v2.6 is not working for Visual Studio 2005 I suppose)
Visual Assixt X (around 130$, its autotext feature looks good, seems good bang for the buck, positive rumours about it from one of our customers)
CodeSmart G2 (around 250$, seems good and with a nice templating system as well)
(CodeRush is established but not supporting C++)

(Interesting other free Add-Ins for C++ found during search:

Probably we opt for Visual Assist X as a supplement for Resharper. Just downloading their trial.

Update 9th July 2006: Visual Assist X works quite good. The Header-Switching, C++ Code templates, ability to enable Resharper like colors for C++, help for typing include<file...> is all really helpful. Positive also that the same plugin works under eVC 3.0, VC++ 6, Visual Studio 2003 and Visual Studio 2005, sharing the settings e.g. for templates and colors for the same languages. I still miss the copy-member feature of CodeWiz2.

Update Aug. 30th 2006: the new version of CodeWiz 2 works in Visual Studio 2005.

Update Sep. 19th 2006: The new version 10 of Visual AssistX is a major update, containing simple refactoring support for C++ now. We have Ref++ for that right now, which is rather mediocre. Currently I have 3 Add-ins for coding C++ in Visual Studio 2005 - dropping Ref++ means it's just two now. Yeah.

Update Nov. 1st 2006: It seems Visual Studio 2005 finally supports Code Snippets too for C++ with their new Powertoys.

code colorizer

2006-03-06T13:05:00.000+01:00

just a link: http://www.carlosag.net/Tools/CodeColorizer/

batch files: search and replace strings in a variable

2006-03-01T17:54:00.000+01:00

Task: Create timestamped filename in a batch file.

Problem: %DATE% is ok (1.03.2005 on my pc) but %TIME% returns a string with colons (17:37:59,49) which are not allowed in file names.

Solution: Put e.g. %DATE%-%TIME% into a variable and replace its colons (:) with a hyphen (-) with Batchfiles SET - Variable Editing.

SET FileName=SomethingFrom%DATE%-%TIME%.txt
SET FileName=%FileName::=_%

A quick fix for simple problem. I just didn't know until now that search and replace in strings was possible in batch files. Did old DOS already support this?

The Backside of an Interface

2006-02-13T14:51:00.000+01:00

This is an interesting way to see (C#-, Java-, COM-) interfaces:

Electrical engineers work with boxes. What comes out of the box is the interface. What's inside the box is the implementation.
Here's a box. Is this its interface? No, not quite. It has a back as well as a front, and here's the back. The interface consists of both the front, with the user controls, and the back, with all the wires going to the rest of the world.

read on: The Backside of an Interface

Link: Don't do Shell Extensions in .Net

2005-11-23T18:43:00.000+01:00

This is an interesting information (found via Larry Osterman):
Don't do Shell Extension Handlers in .NET (MSDN blog from Junfeng Zhang).

I wrote a little .SGF Shell extension for go players. It's old VC6 code and I don't really consider rewriting it - but it's a very interesting information that it's also a BAD idea to do this in .NET (which would have been my primary choice next time).

(ps: there's a little update to come though for my SGF tools: I'll make an installer soon).

Windows blog clients (preferrably free)

2005-11-14T18:30:00.000+01:00

Blog clients are tools to write and edit blog entries instead of doing it directly in the browser (I hate that). So let me just state this:

w.Bloggar works ok and is almost feature complete,
IMHO Instant Blogger has WYSIWYG editing but has not as much features (only one blog, no editing of old entries, configuration not as easy)
BlogJet is nice but 40 Euros
my new star is the great Zoundry BlogWriter - it beats them all (read my german rants about it):
- free
- WYSIWYG editor, preview with automatic template import of blogger.com (great!)
- manages multiple blogs, old entries, offline saving, tags, ...

I don't think Zoundry's business idea (being a middle man for affiliate links) will work. So download their free client fast - as long as this company is alive. It doesn't need any registration or Zoundry accounts and is working well (my version: 0.9.137)

Interesting: the whole program seems to be written in Python - this is the first Windows application I see written in Python and it's remarkably well done.

(Update Aug.30th 2006: WindowsLiveWriter is new and free, quite sexy and works with many Blog engines. Even has an Sdk and is on its way to the most sophisticated blog client. Hmm.)

Need Icons? Steal resources with PEResourceExplorer

2005-10-18T18:42:00.000+02:00

This post is very basic. I just want to keep a bookmark to PEResourceExplorer somewhere and will now construct some sentences to hide this fact:

What for: I was in the need for some nice icons for Run, Cancel and Open File for a simple program (nothing to be released). And I wanted to use/steel orignal Windows XP icons for this (I think they actually are somewhat copyright protected, are they?).

How: I could have taken screenshots. This works well. I like Paint .Net as a fast/simple/free image processing program to save them after pressing Alt-Print.

How #2: Once I found Build\ImageList16.png and Build\ImageList24.png in the free sources of Lutz Roeders CommandBar I always look there first for standard icons - and found a nice open file button.

How #3: Another way to get icons is to look at the (program) binaries, which can contain them too as resources. Windows\System32\Shell32.dll for example contains many of the typical Windows icons. One only needs a program to rip them off. I searched and quickly found this one: PEResourceExplorer. Looks ok, is free, works. Linking there is the solely purpose of this post ;).

Update 2005-12-08: nice basic icons for free can be found here: http://www.glyfx.com/free.html (found via Larkware) Update 2005-12-19: another free icons set (700 icons in 16x16) is here: http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/silk/ (again found via Larkware) Update 2006-05-12: more free icon resources listed on http://www.drweb.de/weblog/weblog/?p=541 Update 2006-06-29: Visual Studio 2005 ships with a nice pack of standard icons, look in Common7/VS2005ImageLibrary. This is my main source for icons and button images at the moment. (via Brad Adams) Update 2006-09-07: Via WinSnap I found http://www.iconaholic.com/downloads.html, looks interesting too (but only free for private nonpublic use) Update 2006-12-16: steal, not steel

CodeSmith, CSS, VbScript Reference

2005-10-14T19:39:00.000+02:00

Ah, finally released it and threw it over the wall. Three completely unrelated notes before jumping into weekend:

To try: Code generation with CodeSmith
I've read soooooo often in so many posts, that CodeSmith is a great tool. It started out free but has gone commercial. But when I looked at the website last time it seemed the free version was gone. Boy I must have been blind: there is still free version of CodeSmith: 2.6. I'll try it out as soon as I see an opportunity.

To try: Really using CSS in Html
Mentally I'm still stuck with the tables paradigm. But I just read a very nice presentation why to drop tables and go CSS. Well, somewhen in the remote future I'll follow and really use <div> myself.

To find or write: Nice VbScript Reference
VbScript is quite nice actually for writing scripts running locally like batch files. WSH is built into Windows and can do almost everything. The syntax is ugly - but well, perl's syntax is ugly too and i liked perl. SciTe supports VbScript syntax highlighting so I have an editor (always looking for an improvement though).

But what I'm massively missing is a nice VbScript [pocket] [quick] reference like the great Rex Swains's HTMLified Perl 5 Reference Guide. Everyone is pointing to the msdn, which isn't that great for learning the language and solving problems, really. Everything is written somewhere but you'll hardly ever find it until you know the solution yourself. There are some books and even reference html pages to buy. But I haven't found an equivalent to Swain's Reference yet. Especially annoying is how the information is spread over several places since you are not using VbScript itself e.g. to copy files but Scripting.FileSystemObject.

Seems like I'll have to compile stuff myself. Just started ripping off html code from these places and putting them into a single HTML page:

VBScript Reference from Technetex (spread on several pages, describes language basics and functions quite well)
Scripts Collection from ActiveXperts (very well hierarchically organized examples for e.g. file operations and interfacing with Windows in almost every imaginable way)

Visual Build Tools

2005-10-13T20:35:00.000+02:00

I just want a simple tool to build several Visual Studio .Net 2003 projects, maybe run something to create an installer and run some batch files to collect things for distribution. It's enough if tool just captures console output. It should stop on error. Nice GUI is a must.

Nant is ugly and just text based and does not well integrate with Visual Studio .Net 2003.

MSBuild is the future but only fun with Visual Studio .Net 2005.

FinalBuilder seems to be a very slick product, but it's not free and currently not in our tool list. Maybe later? Well, Joel Spolsky is recommending it, that's a huge pro anyway:).

Visual Build Professional looks not as slick but has a nice feature list. Not in our tool list too.

Yesterday I found this one and I am quite happy with it in the first run: MegaBuild. .Net, cheap, looks nice and simple:

A donation is not improbable if proves itself over time.

Hosting Windows.Forms User Controls in Mfc 7.1

2005-10-13T19:19:00.000+02:00

Here's the setup:
A GUI is written in .Net and has to be integrated into third party product (say like Outlook) as an ActiveX control. Unfortunately the only supported host for Windows.Forms user controls in .Net Framework 1.1 is currently .Net itself, the Internet Explorer 7 and ... MFC 7.1 (see MSDN mag 2003/03). This happened to be true for our case as well. The hack of putting the user control directly into the 3rd party app did not work. (The hack: register the assembly and add some registry keys, see ".NET and COM - The Complete Interoperability Guide" by Adam Nathan page 471. It worked in the ActiceX Control Test Container but not the our 3rd party app).

The MSDN article has example source code to host a Windows.Forms.Control in MFC 7.1. It works pretty well, but only in Debug mode(I'm building an ActiveX OCX). Compiled as Release I always got strange a NullReferenceException in the copied MSDN code. I tracked it down to this line (in ::OnCreate):

spunkControl.Attach((IUnknown*)System::Runtime::InteropServices::Marshal::GetIUnknownForObject(ctrlWinForms).ToPointer());

This line works perfectly well when compiled in Debug . In the Release build it's not working for me (and causing MSDN code later to throw a NullReferenceException), maybe due to optimization?

Doing each step one by one is working in Release too:

System::Windows::Forms::Control* ctrlWinForms;
CComPtr<IUnknown> spunkControl;

// load assembly and stuff ...

System::IntPtr iUnknown = System::Runtime::InteropServices::Marshal::GetIUnknownForObject(ctrlWinForms);
if (System::IntPtr::Zero == iUnknown)
{    // failed to get IUnknown
    ::MessageBox(NULL, "Failed to get an IUnknown for ctrlWinForms ", "Init failed", MB_OK);
    return VARIANT_FALSE;
}

spunkControl.Attach((IUnknown*)iUnknown.ToPointer());
if (!spunkControl)
{    // failed to attach
    ::MessageBox(NULL, "Failed to attach the IUnknown for ctrlWinForms ", "Init failed", MB_OK);
    return VARIANT_FALSE;
}

Final note: the docs for GetIUnknownForObject are explicitly stating, that one has to call a Marshal.Release later. CComPtr<>::Attach is not doing an AddRef though and being a smartpointer calls Release automaticly on exit.

Blog started

2005-10-13T18:02:00.000+02:00

I'm starting this blog to take some technical notes during my work as a programmer.

My personal blog gomasch is in german and I wanted to seperate programming stuff from that.