http://www.alteridem.net Software by Design Fri, 23 May 2008 17:30:08 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Today I was working writing auto-updating for some software. I wanted to base it on the Product Version property in the installer MSI file, so I needed some code to read that from the file. It took a fair amount of searching and code tweaking, but I finally worked it ... http://www.alteridem.net/2008/05/20/read-properties-from-an-msi-file/ I have been contacted people who cannot attend my Toronto Code Camp session on log4net tomorrow requesting a copy of my presentation and example code. I cannot find it posted on the Code Camp site, so here is a copy for anyone who is interested. The presentation is in PowerPoint ... http://www.alteridem.net/2008/02/29/log4net-slides-and-example-code/ I've been doing a lot of managed C++ programming lately and I had forgotten what a pain it is switching back and forth between the header file and source file.  Back in the days of Visual Studio 6 I had a macro that switched between the CPP and H file, ... http://www.alteridem.net/2008/02/26/visual-studio-macro-to-switch-between-cpp-and-h-files/ I found out last week that I will be speaking at this year's Toronto Code Camp on March 1st.  I will be giving an Introduction to log4net from 9:00 AM to 10:15 AM. I will begin the session with an overview of the license, features and capabilities of log4net, ... http://www.alteridem.net/2008/01/28/speaking-at-toronto-code-camp/ Do you ever find yourself using DateTime to time a section of code?  Do you have code like the following? DateTime start = DateTime.Now; // Perform a long process Thread.Sleep( 1968 ); DateTime end = DateTime.Now; TimeSpan duration = end.Subtract( start ); Console.WriteLine( ... http://www.alteridem.net/2008/01/14/the-stopwatch-class-in-net/ In log4net speak, an appender is an output destination for a log such as a file, the console, a database or even email.  log4net ships with so many appenders that most of us will never need to write our own.  There are cases where you may find a need for ... http://www.alteridem.net/2008/01/10/writing-an-appender-for-log4net/ Here is a cool Visual Studio feature that almost nobody knows about. If you want to open up a file in your solution, but can't be bothered to dig down through your projects and folders to find it, try this, Click in the Find box in the toolbar, ... http://www.alteridem.net/2007/09/11/quickly-findopen-a-file-in-visual-studio/ New Rule: Make sure your parameter names are consistent between your declarations and definitions in C++. Here is why... I was trying to debug some C++/CLR code today when I ran into an interesting behavior (bug?) in Visual Studio 2005. I had a breakpoint in the first line of my ... http://www.alteridem.net/2007/09/11/debugging-c-method-parameters/ Unless you have been inspecting some of the code generated by Visual Studio, you probably haven't realized that there are several attributes that you can add to your code to make debugging easier. Some prevent you from stepping into sections of code, others change the way variables are displayed in ... http://www.alteridem.net/2007/09/05/easier-debugging-with-attributes/ I have been migrating a large application from Win32/MFC to .NET and ran into an interesting problem. We store all of the application colors in the database as integers that represent the Win32 COLORREF value. COLORREF is just a DWORD representing the RGB value, so I thought that I could just take the ... http://www.alteridem.net/2007/08/23/win32-colorref-vs-net-color/