I’m starting to dig into Mercurial outside of work and really enjoy it, a lot!  I’m currently hosting a couple projects up at Bitbucket.org.  Their services are great and the free account gives you one private repository.  Their upgrade path is wallet friendly also.  If you haven’t tried their services I’d recommend you give them a good look over, you’ll be happy you did.

Back to the point of the post, since I’m doing more and more mercurial, I ran across this cheatsheet last night and I think it’s organized rather well.  Print it out and commit & push away!

Here's a good article on how to do comments and tasks inside Visual Studio.  There are a lot of good tips in there, definitely a good read.

Steve Dunn recently released a new version of his Windows Live Writer plugin that allows you to insert code into your blog posts that properly formats and highlights everything.  It’s customizable and easy to use with a plethora of options.  This is by far the best code formatter for Live Writer out there.  And best of all, its FREE!  Here are a few samples of the different formats you can use:

Highlighted code:

        /// <summary>
        /// Retrieves all articles.
        /// </summary>
        public override List<ArticleDetails> GetArticles(int pageIndex, int pageSize)
        {
            List<ArticleDetails> articles = new List<ArticleDetails>();
            using (SqlConnection cn = new SqlConnection(this.ConnectionString))

Formatted code:

        /// <summary>
        /// Retrieves all articles.
        /// </summary>
        public override List<ArticleDetails> GetArticles(int pageIndex, int pageSize)
        {
            List<ArticleDetails> articles = new List<ArticleDetails>();
            using (SqlConnection cn = new SqlConnection(this.ConnectionString))

Code as bitmap:

This is a great tool – you can download the plugin here.  Enjoy!

I just received an email from Joe Albahari, creator of LINQPad, about a webinar he’s giving on April 16, 2009.  Joe has added some great new features to the upcoming version and has even placed the beta on his web site for us to preview.  Some of the new features are:

• The ability to query your own LINQ to SQL or Entity Framework classes
• ESQL querying
• First-class support for 1:1 relationships
• Enhanced autocompletion support including smart tags
• The ability to edit stored procedures, functions and views within LINQPad

Very good stuff.  You can get the preview here.

Recently I was having a heck of a time figuring out why I couldn't connect to my work machine through VPN to the console.  I could in the past, but for some reason could not anymore.  I tried a variety of settings, both on my home machine and my work machine to no avail.  Finally, after searching the web, I found that if you have Windows XP SP3 installed, the /console command doesn't work anymore.  After I read that I realized that I did indeed update my home machine (its a Virtual PC) to SP3.  With SP3 you must use /admin instead of /console.  I guess I'm not mad about the change, but what really annoys me is that the new command has no compatibility with the old command.  It simply leaves you dead in the water.  They just removed the /console parameter and removed it from the documentation also.  So the command I use now is:

mstsc /v:machinename /admin /f

I hope this saves someone the frustration I had until I found out the new paramter name.

This last week, Microsoft made available a web form that anyone can use to request hotfixes.  No more special requests or phone calls, now there's a single place where, simply by filling a web form, you can request the hotfix you want.  You can get to the form here. 

You will get a form mail in response, and in it will be a link to an http site you can download the fix from.

After using Resharper 2.0 for over a month now, I have had enough time for me to decide which tool I'm going to use from now on.  That tool is CodeRush and Refactor! Pro from Developer Express.

Having used Resharper 1.x thoroughly in the past, I am very familiar with the tool.  I tried several of the 2.0 betas, but decided to wait for the final release due to all the bugs and crashes involved with beta testing.  When 2.0 finally came out I was very excited to try out all of the new features.  Installation went without a hitch and I was up and running in no time.  Over the course of a month and a half, I only had the tool crash on me 3 times, not too bad.  There wasn't any one thing that I disliked or found to have problems.  The thing that really bothered me was how slow it was.  Just starting VS2005 (not opening a solution/project) takes almost 30 seconds, and I'm running it on a very fast machine (P4 3.8Ghz 64-bit, 2Gigs mem).  I have heard other people complain over this same issue.  So tonight I'm reinstalling CodeRush and Refactor! Pro.  If you haven't had a chance to try it out, you definately should.  It's rock solid with tons of features.  To make things even better, version 2.0 is coming out this week with tons of new features.  You can read about it here.  One of the nice things is they are packaging CodeRush and Refactor! Pro together now.

While modifying my build process, I was trying to use NDoc 1.3.1 with VS2005 and .NET 2.0 and came to the realization that NDoc does not work with .NET 2.0.  After googling it for over an hour, the author of NDoc has stated that he is currently working on updating NDoc to support .NET 2.0.  The last update he gave, however, was back in October so I have no idea when we'll be able to get a version that we can test/use.

I was researching some stop-gap solutions that I could use in the meantime and came across Doc-O-Matic and Doxygen.  Doxygen is open-source while Doc-O-Matic is not (hefty price tag if you ask me).  If you're like me and need to generate documentation, take a look at those...at least until NDoc2 is released.

I just posted about NUnit 2.2.4 being released and it seems they just released a newer version, 2.2.5 that has several bug fixes discovered in the 2.2.4 release.  It replaces 2.2.4 as their recommended download.

Grab it here.

The good folks over at NUnit released version 2.2.4 yesterday.  They have seperate downloads for each version of the .NET Framework available.  This is a production release so it's been tested pretty well and is a recommended version.

Grab the latest version here.

I just read on Scott Guthrie's blog about the CSS Properties window Visual Studio add-on.  This is the coolest add-on that allows you to view stylesheet properties in a seperate window.  Although the built-in style builder enables you to create and edit in-line styles, there's no way to edit the styles that are inherited from a linked style sheet - the new CSS Properties window provides this capability.  It allows you to edit both in-line styles and styles in linked style sheets.

Give it a try here.