DotPeek

Almost two years ago .NET Reflector went into freeware history. First it was $35 but price has gone since to $95 these days. For something that was freeware once this is quite an increase.

Strictly speaking I was not really affected. Microsoft released source code for basic .NET libraries quite a long ago so most of my snooping needs were covered. But setting that up was pain-in-the-ass compared to the pure simplicity of .NET Reflector.

JetBrains, creators of ReSharper tool, created new tool called dotPeek. For all practical purposes we can view it as long lost cousin of .NET Reflector. Best of all it is completely free (at least in version 1.0).

Product is not without fault. On Windows 8 I could not get document search to work; source produced has extra spaces here and there; it does not support Visual Basic; there is no option to save a file; project export is not possible; it sometime breaks Alt-Tab behavior… Those are just biggest complaints that show it is definitely not without fault.

But I like it nevertheless!

It worked perfectly on all code that I gave it and has always produced acceptable code. Stack trace browsing allows to track function calls across assemblies with ease and it is feature that I never thought of before but it seems so logical now.

Browsing though code is probably as good as it gets once you get used to keyboard shortcuts. And editor support for code folding is fantastic. Since that is what you actually need 95% of time, all bugs / forgotten features are easily forgotten.

It is tool that is worth its place in toolbox of every C# programmer.

P.S. No, it does not have stupid time restrictions that drove me crazy even in freeware .NET Reflector.

Windows 8 Media Center Pack for Free

Windows 8 came with some multimedia features missing. Mind you, it was by design. Missing features were made available as separate product named Windows 8 Media Center Pack. For a small cost ($10) you can make your Windows 8 work as good as Windows 7. Nice touch.

Good news is that you can get it for free. There are two conditions: you must have Windows 8 Professional (MSDN works also) and you must activate it before January 31st 2013. If that is true, just go to Microsoft feature pack pages and give your e-mail address. In few minutes you should get a key.

With that key just search for Add Features in Settings and enter key when asked to. Feature will be downloaded in background. Just take care not to do anything else on system since installation will restart your computer without any warning (!). After restart you will have one more restart (?) and then Windows Media Center will magically appear.

84% of Bullshit

There is an article in Washington Post saying that Windows 8 is 84% less frustrating than Windows 7. It probably comes from same world where 98% of all statistics are manufactured or “adjusted”.

I will admit outright that I have small sample size of 2+. One is me (yes, I am running Windows 8 again) and my wife is second (running Windows 8 on her netbook). Plus signifies anecdotal frustration evidence from friends. For purpose of this article I will disregard all troubles I already menioned and stick to single one: Fitts’s law.

When working at desktop people are used to having significant things in corner. We have close button in upper-right, application icon in upper-left (double-click functions as close here), we had start button in lower-right and show desktop in lower-left. With Windows 8 left side of deal got broken.

When I try to close application by double-clicking its icon, I never manage to do it. Stupid task switcher pops out and brings me in another application. Starting first application in taskbar has same issue. It is just too easy to switch with mouse (and especially with trackpad) to start screen.

Even if you try to stick to new Windows UI you will get into trouble. Regardless of how significant new UI was to Microsoft, they haven’t bothered to transfer all internal applications to it. You cannot work more than 5 minutes on anything without being thrown back into a desktop. And all those context switches are exhausting.

Best thing that Vista brought was search from within Start menu. We have same thing in Windows 8 but segregated into Apps, Settings and Files. Yes, now you need to know where thing you are searching is. And start screen soon becomes unwieldy mess because every single application gets it icons there. Yes, applications did the same to Start Menu in Windows 7 but I didn’t need to look at it the whole time.

I will not even get into picture viewer that makes it impossible to view next image or mail application that shows first mail and selected one upon clicking. Most of applications in the new UI are probably designed by bunch of non-supervised interns since their basic functionality is usually not working. And good luck finding alternative in Store that is as deserted as church on Friday night.

I agree that on tablets this all works and Windows 8 will probably be 84.07692307692308% better on them. I will also agree that insides of Windows 8 make it most powerful system out there. However, I don’t recall one person saying that something in Windows 8 does not frustrate them. And, mind you, these are users that had Windows 8 for couple of months now.

It just tell that as soon as you assign percents to satisfaction, you are just being a jackass.

Deleting Team Foundation Services Project

As you try new service, one is bound to make a lot of mess. I did the same with my Team Foundation Services account. After initial testing was done I decided to make a clean start and delete a project.

It took me quite a while to give up on finding delete. It seems that somebody forgot to take his pills during design phase and thus delete button does not exist.

Fortunately, this is just an Team Foundation Server so good old command line will do nicely:

CD "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0\Common7\IDE"

TFSDeleteProject.exe /collection:https://jmedved.visualstudio.com/DefaultCollection/ Test
 Warning: Deleting a team project is an irrecoverable operation. All version control, work item tracking and Team Foundation build data will be destroyed from the system. The only way to recover this data is by restoring a stored backup of the databases. Are you sure you want to delete the team project and all of its data (Y/N)? Y
 Deleting from Build ...
 Done
 Deleting from Version Control ...
 Done
 Deleting from Work Item Tracking ...
 Done
 Deleting from TestManagement ...
 Done
 Deleting from ProcessManagement ...
 Done
 Deleting from LabManagement ...
 Done
 Deleting from ProjectServer ...
 Done
 Warning. Did not find Report Server service.
 Warning. Did not find SharePoint site service.
 Deleting from Team Foundation Core ...
 Done

Of course, if you want to create new project with same name, do not forget to visit File -> Source Control -> Advanced -> Workspaces in order to remove last traces.

Solving Case of Missing Tests

I was quite surprised when Visual Studio 2012 could not run any unit tests for one project of mine. Every time I would hit rebuild, same output would appear “Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation.” and Test Explorer would stay empty.

Solution that worked for me was just deleting whole TestResults directory. One rebuild after, Test Explorer was full once more.

How did this corruption occur is different matter completely. Since this project was converted from Visual Studio 2010 it might be something in conversion process gone wrong. Or it might have been some disk error. Or my habit of interrupting build process finally got me. I will probably never know.