ThoughtShapes Shaping Ideas With Thought

ReSharper 3.x allows the user to control precisely how their code layout is handled. They have created an XML vocabulary and exposed it under the setting: ReSharper > Options > Languages > C# > Type Members Layout. Unfortunately the default layout in ReSharper 3.1 has unacceptable logic flaws when formatting NUnit fixtures as well overuse of regions.

We use the following ReSharper Type Members Layout in our projects. Feel free to leave a comment or thought about it.

Last updated on 2/25/2008

Console2 is a fine replacement for the standard command console that comes with Windows - including Vista. The features of primary value are:

• Tabbed Interface: contains multiple consoles within main window. Switch consoles by hitting Ctrl+Tab or clicking tab window.
• Transparency Support: enables sharing desktop space with other windows.
• Minimal Skin: you can get Console2 down to nothing - not even a border.

Windows Vista ushers in the concept of Limited User Account (LUA) to the Microsoft world. The rest of the world has always known this practice, but now we too can rest assured that privileged operations will only occur when we elevate our account privileges.

When you attempt to perform a privileged operation in Vista e.g. copy a file to %SystemRoot%, User Account Control (UAC) challenges you for an administrative password. Great stuff.

Here are the Resharper code style settings we use. We sat down together not that long ago and went over every single setting and collaborated on what we like to see when we develop. Some you might argue with, some you might not, but these are what we like. We'd like to jot down some of the reasons why we chose a few of these settings that are likely to generate a "Why did they choose this?" from anyone that uses these, but there are so many settings that we have to shout "We don't have the time to do this right now!" as our mea culpa...but perhaps we'll add them later.

NCover is a tool that analyzes running code and is able to determine whether code was visited or unvisited while running. Visited code is code that was executed during the running of a process, and unvisited code is code that was not executed.

Man, this is a particularly sensitive topic to me, I must admit. That's mostly because "you must comment all your code" is usually a directive that comes from one of three kinds of people--each non-exclusive of the other:

You can download NCover using the links provided on the left. Once you have it downloaded, you install it (it comes as an msi file, even though I doubt it really needs anything but an xcopy deployment).

Now that we've taken a look at how to run NCover from the command-line and how to use NCoverExplorer to view NCover's output, we can take a look at the features in NCoverExplorer that allow you to do everything right from within its user-interface. If you click on the "Run NCover" button (the fifth from the left on the NCoverExplorer interface), you'll see this window:

NCoverExplorer is a tool that does a great job of displaying NCover's test coverage XML output so that you can quickly make sense of it and put it to good use. To take you through an example, let's imagine I have a struct called PersonName in a C# project called Domain:

This is the third example project in this series and is based off of the second example. This is a complete example of WCF using OO principles that leverage the NetDataContractSerializer. This example creates a number of clients that access the WCF service through multiple threads (a thread for each client). This example also demonstrates the ability of WCF to call back to clients--which is useful for "push" messaging scenarios. The zip file contains the following projects: