Wintellect  

October 2007 - Posts

itoldyouso – An Undocumented WinDBG Extension Command

Aaron Lerch recently wrote about a funny name for an exported function he saw exported from DBGHELP.DLL, itoldyouso. Aaron showed a small section of the Dependency Walker output, which piqued my curiosity. Below is a larger screen shot. Does anything Read More...
Posted Sunday, October 28, 2007 9:30 AM by jrobbins | 4 Comments

The Six Its – The Key to Breaking Down Schedules

I'm sure everyone's already read Joel Spolsky's excellent discussion of Evidenced Based Scheduling, but if you haven't you're missing out. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to know that scheduling is the hardest part of software. We all got into this Read More...
Posted Sunday, October 28, 2007 5:50 AM by jrobbins | 1 Comments

WiX: A Better TALLOW – PARAFFIN (Part 3 of 3)

In the first installment of this series I discussed an introduction to WiX . In the second installment, I talked about the issues related to creating .WXS files with TALLOW.EXE and how you have to manually maintain those files by hand, which can be tedious Read More...
Posted Sunday, October 21, 2007 11:20 PM by jrobbins | 20 Comments

WiX: The Pain of WiX (Part 2 of 3)

In the first part of this series I gave an introduction to WiX . In this second installment of this three part series, I am assuming that you've read through the Windows Installer documentation and through Gábor Deák Jahn's WiX Tutorial . Additionally, Read More...
Posted Friday, October 19, 2007 9:20 PM by jrobbins | 4 Comments

WiX: Hints for New Users (Part 1 of 3)

If you remember some of the early pronouncements about .NET you probably heard the one where using .NET meant you could just XCOPY your binaries to the server and run them. No wrestling with the difficult Windows Installer technology or strange third Read More...
Posted Thursday, October 18, 2007 5:22 PM by jrobbins | 6 Comments

What Keynote Do You Want to See at Devscovery?

Here at Wintellect, we are deep in the planning phases for next year's Devscovery conferences (April 1-3 in New York, NY, and August 19-21 in Redmond, WA). In past years we've had brilliant developers such as Mark Russinovich , Scott Guthrie , Charles Read More...
Posted Wednesday, October 17, 2007 8:03 PM by jrobbins | 7 Comments

Why I’m Not Writing a Native C++ Debugging Book

In the introduction of my book Debugging Microsoft .NET 2.0 Applications , I said I was going to write a second book focused on native C++ debugging. I've got a great outline prepared that has all sorts of interesting ideas. Some of the highlights are Read More...
Posted Monday, October 15, 2007 11:44 PM by jrobbins | 24 Comments

Spiffy Apple Keyboard vs. Booting From a CD/DVD

As I posted the other day about the Apple Keyboard on Vista , I thought I've follow up with a note that on my Mac Pro the Apple Keyboard did not work when I was attempting to boot from the OS DVD. For some strange reason, I lost WINLOAD.EXE, a super critical Read More...
Posted Monday, October 15, 2007 7:02 AM by jrobbins | 6 Comments

Keeping an Eye on View State

View State is the silent performance killer for any ASP.NET application. I've seen numerous nasty problems related to view states being far larger than anyone could have hoped to guess. My goal was to find an easy way to keep track of view state on a Read More...
Posted Friday, October 12, 2007 2:33 AM by jrobbins | 1 Comments

Using an Apple Keyboard on Vista

As you might have read in the past, I'm a very happy user of Vista x64 on a Mac Pro . I highly recommend the combo. Recently, I purchased an Apple aluminum keyboard . Before you think I'm a total Apple hardware freak (ok, so I am), my motivation for getting Read More...
Posted Tuesday, October 09, 2007 12:12 AM by jrobbins | 20 Comments

Complete Virtual Machine Backups with Mere Minutes of Downtime

Last week, I completely virtualized my life. Well, at least my server life is all virtualized. I'd been running my Team Foundation Server in a virtual machine, but took the plunge to get my domain controller virtualized as well. One of the things I'd Read More...
Posted Monday, October 08, 2007 12:43 AM by jrobbins | 2 Comments