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Category Archives: Main

On-topic posts

On unit tests in Visual Studio 2008 vs NUnit

02-Jun-08

Comparison of Microsoft Visual Studio unit tests (MSTest) vs NUnit, mentioning PartCover and

Please meet: Lua

15-May-08

Lua language brief description, and the best Lua book in CHM.

Another C++ quiz, simpler

14-May-08

Simple C++ quiz about class member pointer.

C++ quiz from the past

14-May-08

C++ quiz about streams, dynamic_cast, temporary values, default type conversions and more…

MSBuild don’ts

15-Apr-08

MSBuild tips: some things you shouldn’t do, and what to do instead.

Bootstrapper also can’t install your application after rebooting…

04-Apr-08

Another problem with MSBuild bootstrappers that can screw all your installation… If scheduling reboot after installing .NET or other prerequisites, bootstrapper copies itself to run from TEMP on boot. Why not staying where it is – who knows. And definitely, all the other MSIs are not copied, so it won’t find them. Reproduced for me. […]

Can’t run .NET bootstrapper from an MSI

02-Apr-08

Now I know it. It’s Windows Installer error 1618 that I didn’t see somewhy when attempting to fix .NET bootstrapper. Either I was inattentive or it wasn’t there: “Another copy of msiexec is running”. You can’t have two Windows Installers running, at least if one of them installs .NET. Information is from this maillist post. […]

MSBuild bootstrapper for .NET 3.0 broken?

31-Mar-08

After Microsoft didn’t include .NET 3.5 in any current release of Windows (read “Vista service pack 1”), some of us developers who believed in long-ago C# 3.0 ads, had to roll back to .NET 3.0 and C# 2.0. Including me. Not mentioning pain of rolling back all LINQ tasties in code and debugging our replacements […]

C++ static code checker

26-Mar-08

Did you ever try parsing C++? What about parsing for every combination of possible define-s at once? Microsoft has a static code checker tools for C++, like FxCop for .NET. That’s awfully complex task, you now see. In .NET you can analyze bytecode, and luckily don’t really need to account for conditional compilation. In C++ […]

WiX linkdump: samples and howto-s I found, mostly .NET deployment

21-Mar-08

Some pages that somewhy didn’t appear at top of Google searches for WiX help. WiXWiki.com – pretty useful and contains some snippets you won’t find in WiX manual or tutorial. Many of rare code snippets WiX development releases; some broken (last two broken in VS 2008), some contain the very things you’ll need; Justin Rockwood’s […]

NAnt vs MSBuild funnies

20-Mar-08

All the software is equally bad… Well, I know some pieces of software that are good, but I won’t mention them today. One of our msbuild vs nant choice criteria is  a product versioning support. Sad or funny things are: both don’t include sane tool out of box; both need installing NAntContrib or MSBuild Community […]

Auto-update with WiX

12-Mar-08

Update: for a ready solution (library), see official release announcement 🙂 Windows Installer on itself is a pain. WiX saves you from it, mostly wrapping the complexity into XML constructs understandable to non-gurus. Well, not completely – you still have to know: why the heck shortcut didn’t appear in start menu; how to create a […]