In Absentia

The name Mark Russinovich should be familiar to anyone in the IT industry. He’s the co-founder of Winternals (which operated the Sysinternals website), now owned by Microsoft. Mark is a co-author of the Windows Internals books, and the creator of such tools as Process Explorer, Autoruns and Process Monitor, which are just a small subset of the Sysinternals tools arsenal, which is being used daily by programmers, IT and computer forensics experts around the world.

I had an interesting bug submitted by a user, he wrote that our product was crashing in his Visual Studio 2010, which was a Traditional Chinese edition.

Typemock Isolator, being a Visual Studio add-in, adds a menu next to the Tools menu in Visual Studio. It does so by looking for an index of the Tools menu in the main menu bar, and simply adding the Typemock menu after it. However, the Tools menu is only called that in the English locale. In other languages, the menu might be called differently. In French, for instance, it’s called Outils.

Version 2.0 of TortoiseHg, the best Windows client for the Mercurial distributed source control system, was released a few days ago, featuring a complete UI overhaul and numerous fixes and improvements.

I was trying to install Ubuntu using this tutorial by Scott Hanselman, where upon pressing Create virtual machine, I was met with the following error message:

Working on a greenfield project with a great team of developers is probably the best thing that can happen. You’re engaged in shaping and molding your ideas into code. Better if you’re an agile team, continuously improving and adding value.

Here’s a neat trick which allows you to debug a process by attaching a debugger upon process start. It’s useful at times when you can’t directly launch an application with debugger attached, or you have a process which accepts command line parameters which are not directly under your control (such as QTAgent32.exe, which is the MSTest unit test runner, launched by Visual Studio).

I was delighted to talk about ReSharper at the recent meeting of the ALT.NET Israel group. I chose ReSharper for the reason that I use it every day, and I can’t imagine myself programming without it. I wanted to share with the rest some tips, tricks and general hidden features of this wonderful tool that I’ve learned over the years using it.

Converting SVN to Mercurial, while keeping all the commit history, might sound like a hard thing to do, but in fact it isn’t! This functionality is already built into Mercurial, it’s just not enabled by default.

Something happened to my Visual Studio 2008 install, and I was no longer able to compile C++ projects in x64 configuration - the build would always skip it. The problem also manifested itself by showing an error message: The operation could not be completed. Unspecified error when I tried to view the C++ project properties in x64 configuration. I ran a repair installation of Visual Studio and Service Pack 1, it didn’t help.

In my previous post on how to find static fields in the entire solution using ReSharper and a free ReSharper plug-in, Agent Smith, I briefly mentioned that the described trick can be used to aid documenting the public API. Some people have asked me to elaborate, so here goes: