bling on software

Decompilers in the .NET space has changed a lot since the announcement from Red Gate that they were going to start charging for Reflector, which was the defacto most important/useful tool in any developer’s tool belt. This blog post will be a quick overview to take a look at all the new contenders that have cropped up in the .NET space to see if any of them can dethrone Reflector as the decompiler of choice. Read on...

I spent a good few hours yesterday trying out a new programming font.  It’s a personal thing.  I like switch fonts every couple weeks, and while Consolas is an excellent font and I have nothing against it, to me, it’s….too simple.  For most people, the defaults are just fine, and they can’t be bothered to try another font.  But for me, I want my font to speak to me a little.  But enough of that voodoo magic stuff. Read on...

See the introduction here. The MSBuild task as it stands currently by default will attempt to weave everything that it finds.  This is probably not optimal in most use cases, but any changes is a simple modification to the LINQ query in the code.  For now, it’s only available in source format since there are bound to be bugs here and there, and once those get ironed out it’ll be easier to release a “point something” release. Read on...

As part of my demonstration for the NYC .NET Meetup in the next couple of days, I prepared some material to show how to use Mono.Cecil to manually weave IL as a post-build step.  It solves the problem of what I call “WPF Verbosity Hell”: the thing that makes your eyes bleed and makes God kill a kitten every time you declare a new property. Since notifypropertyweaver already exists, I figured I’d release the other side of the coin, dependencypropertyweaver.  I just pushed my changes onto GitHub. Read on...

I’m working on a project right now that has near 99% of its code commented.  Wow, that’s impressive!  Actually, it’s more scary…even some of the private fields are commented…. At one point, someone decided that it was a good idea to impose some kind of standard rather than none, so they recommended StyleCop with all of its default settings, including requiring comments on everything. This seemed like a good idea, and it probably was, until someone found GhostDoc.  The plugin definitely gives off that “cool” factor the first time you use it.  Wow, with a single key stroke it automagically documented all of my code!!!  The problem, and it’s a pretty big one, is that it generates documentation based on the name of the properties, names, and class.  Surely if it can do that, you, a much more sophisticated machine, can do that! Read on...