In Absentia

Sometimes, we wish we could just step into some 3^rd party library, to figure out how it works, but we either don’t have the source code, or otherwise just can’t. Fortunately, this is made possible by dotPeek v1.2 that was just released, which can act as a symbol server for decompiled assemblies!

This is a step-by-step recount of my attempt to migrate an existing 3-year old TFS (TFVC) repository to git, while keeping all the history, and then moving it to Visual Studio Online, a TFS in the cloud. This wasn’t an easy task, as there is no direct export-import built into either tools. I also ran into some problems during this lengthy process, and I describe the steps to solve them. Set aside a few hours of your time, brew some coffee (or tea), and let’s get started!

I was called over to see if I could help solve a strange issue - every time the build script (Ant) for the client’s Android app ran - certain files that were modified by the build script (a .properties file, few others), were suddenly inaccessible to other people logging to the machine - only the user who initiated the build could still write to the files. Looking at the file permissions tab proved as much: only the current user and the Administrators group could access the file!

It’s funny how a random twitter rant can yield valid solutions. One such rant between @omervk (who co-runs plaintextoffenders.com) and myself regarding enabling Two Factor Authentication (2FA, or login verification) on twitter being unavailable for people in Israel, caught the attention of Per Thorsheim, an independent security consultant and founder of the Passwords conference. Per, turns out, was interested in this problem because of another matter, that Twitter seemingly turned off login verification for people who do not have their phone numbers associated with Twitter! Per wrote about his own experiences trying to enable 2FA on twitter here.

Lately I found myself launching scriptcs more and more to do simple calculations. I half-jokingly said on twitter that I’d better remap calc.exe to scriptcs.exe on my machine. However it seems that my joke tweet was taken seriously by some people, and I was asked how this was done. So here goes!

Not 10 minutes passed since the Roslyn open-sourcing announcement at Build 2014, which by itself is a monumental, historic event for Microsoft and the .NET community worldwide; some people already started predicting the demise of ReSharper. It’s been a week or so, and JetBrains finally posted a Q&A where they explain their reasons for not moving to Roslyn as predicted, at least not in the foreseeable future. Which, in turn, caused yet another sea of comments, both supporting and condemning the decision.

Let’s get this out of the way first: this is not a post about how to use Nancy - there are lots of blog posts out there, written by people far better at it than me!

I am not a web developer. During my career I mostly worked on desktop applications (with occasional dab in the database land, typical CRUD stuff). Over the years my passion for development shifted towards building development tools (Visual Studio, ReSharper plugins), and my dayjob now having a blast building OzCode, a debugging productivity tool for Visual Studio.

There are two ways to install Visual Studio extensions: via VSIX installed from the Visual Studio gallery (or by double-clicking, which executes VSIXInstaller.exe), or manually, by copying the files from a custom installer, typically MSI (and specifying a special <InstalledByMsi>true</InstalledByMsi> element in the extension.vsixmanifest file). The latter approach is generally used if the extension needs to perform additional tasks, such as running ngen or registering COM servers.

If you don’t understand the title, I tried to be clever and used regular expressions. I now have 2 problems.

I wasn’t sure how I’d like to begin this blog post. Instead of writing a long and boring introduction that drives my point, I’ll just dump all that boiled inside me for quite a while. Sarcasm and bitterness ahead!