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October 2009 - Posts

VS 2010 Beta 2 Concurrency Visualizer Profiling In Depth First Look

One of the most important technologies used at Microsoft is Event Tracing for Windows (ETW), especially inside Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2. There's a small problem with ETW. It's beyond wonderful for the Windows team at Microsoft, but for just about Read More...
Posted Friday, October 23, 2009 2:58 PM by jrobbins | 4 Comments

VS 2010 Beta 2 Concurrency Resource Profiling In Depth First Look

Nearly everyone reading this is using a machine with multiple cores. With a basic laptop containing a dual core CPU and your average desktop with a four core CPU, we have processing power our computing ancestors could only dream about. Most of us developers Read More...
Posted Monday, October 19, 2009 3:28 PM by jrobbins | 12 Comments

VS 2010 Beta 2 Sampling and Instrumentation Profiling In Depth First Look

While some teams solve their performance problems by throwing bigger hardware at the problem, many of us really do care about creating fast code. Visual Studio 2008 Team Developer Edition and above has had a great profiler that I've used to solve many Read More...
Posted Monday, October 19, 2009 3:28 PM by jrobbins | 4 Comments

VS 2010 Beta 2 Code Analysis In-Depth First Look

Code Analysis is one of those great tools that people don't run nearly enough. I have screamed repeatedly, " Never do anything at run time you can do at compile time. " The best time to catch the Design Guidelines , security, and performance violations Read More...
Posted Monday, October 19, 2009 3:26 PM by jrobbins | 10 Comments

VS 2010 Beta 2 IntelliTrace In-Depth First Look

After getting a fresh copy of Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2, I was dying to see the amazing IntelliTrace feature. You know IntelliTrace as Historical Debugging, but consider HD as the code name. No matter what the marketing people call it, IntelliTrace is Read More...
Posted Monday, October 19, 2009 3:25 PM by jrobbins | 18 Comments

VS 2010 Beta 2 Debugger In-Depth First Look

I love all things diagnostics. After installing VS 2010 Beta 2, the first thing I had to look at my favorite tool of all, the debugger. All the familiar features are there that we've been using for ages, such as advanced breakpoints and the killer expression Read More...
Posted Monday, October 19, 2009 3:24 PM by jrobbins | 8 Comments

My VS 2010 Beta 2 Install Experience

While I was hoping that VS 2010 would just install itself as soon as I downloaded the bits, they haven't quite gotten that feature working just yet. I guess the team had to leave themselves something to do in the next version. I grabbed the new Ultimate Read More...
Posted Monday, October 19, 2009 3:19 PM by jrobbins | 2 Comments

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 is on MSDN!

Go grab it and let the fun begin. See the Beta 2 home page to see what's new and how to get the bits. Read More...
Posted Monday, October 19, 2009 3:13 PM by jrobbins | 1 Comments

Anyone Can Present a Technical Topic

Kate Gregory put together a wonderful set of presentations on Code Project , Extending Visual Studio – What and Why , Top Ten Free Extensions for Visual Studio 2008 and Boosting Developer Productivity by Writing Extensions to Visual Studio . (Make sure Read More...
Posted Wednesday, October 07, 2009 10:19 PM by jrobbins | 1 Comments

Initially Turning on FxCop/Code Analysis for a Large Code Base

Recently I was asked a question that's come up several times so I thought I'd share the answer. I've inherited a large code base that has never had FxCop run on it. When I ran the binaries through FxCop, it reported tens of thousands of warnings, which Read More...
Posted Tuesday, October 06, 2009 6:12 PM by jrobbins | 8 Comments

Updated Compile-Help.PS1 and Neat PowerShell Scripting Tricks

One of my favorite PowerShell scripts of all time is Jeff Hillman's Compile-Help . Instead of attempting to read the PowerShell help in a text window, Jeff's outstanding script packages up all the help into a searchable, linkified, and easy to read Compiled Read More...
Posted Monday, October 05, 2009 11:47 PM by jrobbins | 7 Comments