Aren't ''New and Improved'' the most over used, and contradictory, terms in the marketer's dictionary? How can something and be new, but yet improved because if it is improved that cancels out the new. My point is that I want to tout an updated release of Paraffin, but I guess I'm being too much of an engineer instead of a marketer which is not a ...

After a detour into Historical Debugging, it’s time to come back to return to answering questions about PDB files. Here’s a question from Justin: Thanks for the great post once again. I was looking forward to your debugging virtual training, but unfortunately it was cancelled. The company I work for is pushing pack against building release ...

Edited: I messed up the value name While I’m probably a Luddite, I prefer to read my mail as plain text. However, Outlook 2007 removed the option to set that in the Reading Pane. Poking around a bit, I found if you add a DWORD value, ReadAsPlain, and set the value to 1 in HCKU\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Outlook\Options\Mail, you’ll get ...

Like most people, I didn't realize that the VERSIONINFO resource was only a 16-bit number. Consequently, using my GenerateAssemblyFileVersionTask in the brand spanking new year produces date numbers of 70103, which will produce a CS167 compiler error. To continue to use a ''date'' like format, I updated VersionFile.cs (in Wintellect.Build.Tasks) ...

I botched the upgrade install. I changed the name of the property in MainInstall.WiX I used in the upgrade detection to 30610172VERSIONBEINGUPGRADED at the last minute. Being an idiot, I did all my install testing with the wrong build (long, sad story). I got numerous reports of MSI 2717 errors, which were custom action failures. Once I tested ...

A minor update to the existing code, but added all the cool MSBuild tasks for working offline with TFS as discussed here.  Moved everything to Visual Studio 2005 SP1  Removed mssccprj.scc installed with Wintellect.Visualizers, which obviously wasn't supposed to be installed. Added RemoveVersionControlBindingsTask, ...

(Note: The following may work with Visual SourceSafe or other version control systems, but I only tested with TFS.)(Note 2: Some kind folks indicated I might have sounded more shrill than I probably meant so I've edited this post. Sorry for any offense. There's a reason I need editors!) Now that I’ve finished my book, I finally had a chance to ...

Wil Shipley, the programming god behind the amazing Delicious Monster (sorry, that sexy app is Mac only) has written one of the most cogent posts about software development I've seen in a very long time. I don't care if you're doing Windows, Mac, or CICS development, you have to read his Free Programming Tips are Worth Every Penny. My goal in ...

Chris Jackson was very kind enough to point out that the discussion of debugging services in Chapter 4 of my Debugging Microsoft .NET 2.0 Applications doesn't work on Vista because of session zero isolation. He's absolutely right and I really appreciate him pointing out the error and a great write up on how to make it work. If ...

Fifteen minutes ago I sent in the last PDF chapter review of Debugging Microsoft .NET 2.0 Applications. That means I'm done! The book still has to go through production, but it's out of my hands so I can finally get a bit of life back. As always, finishing writing a book is an adventure and one that feels both good and bad at the same time. The ...