Kevin's Cache

Making Silage

2007-09-05T08:38:00.000-04:00

Did you know silos are expensive? So we make a pile right on the ground. To keep it from spoiling, you have to drive it over it with heavy tractors and compact it again & again. It helps to have a nice new tractor like this one! :-) No, it's not ours; we rented it.

This is how a silage pile 330x35x12 appears from the driver's seat.

Cows!

2006-08-15T23:17:00.000-04:00

Yep, we have heifers now. And the children are fascinated. Looks like a cow is too!

SmartFormat the entire solution

2006-07-18T17:17:00.000-04:00

At work, we recently decided to all use the same c# formatting options in Visual Studio 2005. (Yes, it would be nice to have hooks in the version control package so we each could see the source with our own formatting, but svn doesn't have that.) So, I've been looking for an easy way reformat thousands of files without opening each file manually. I finally gave up looking and cobbled together a quick macro. Here it is.

Let me know if you improve it, ok?


Option Strict Off
Option Explicit Off

Imports EnvDTE
Imports System
Imports System.IO
Imports System.text

Public Module Tools

    Sub SmartFormatSolution()
        Dim project As Project
        Dim projects As Projects = DTE.Solution.Projects()

        For Each project In projects
            Dim pi As ProjectItems = project.ProjectItems()
            If Not (pi Is Nothing) Then
                SmartFormatProjectItems(pi, Level + 1)
            End If
        Next
        MsgBox("Reformat Done", MsgBoxStyle.Information)
    End Sub

    Sub SmartFormatProject()
        Dim projects As System.Array = DTE.ActiveSolutionProjects()
        If projects.Length > 0 Then
            Dim proj As Project = CType(projects.GetValue(0), EnvDTE.Project)
            Dim pi As ProjectItems = proj.ProjectItems()
            If Not (pi Is Nothing) Then
                SmartFormatProjectItems(pi, Level + 1)
            End If
        Else
            MsgBox("No project selected", MsgBoxStyle.Critical)
        End If
        MsgBox("Reformat Done", MsgBoxStyle.Information)
    End Sub

    Sub SmartFormatProjectItems(ByVal ProjItems As ProjectItems, ByVal Level As Integer)
        Dim ProjItem As ProjectItem
        For Each ProjItem In ProjItems
            If InStrRev(ProjItem.Name, ".cs") <> 0 Then
                Dim ActiveWin As Window = ProjItem.Open(Constants.vsViewKindCode)
                ActiveWin.Activate()
                Dim txtDoc As TextDocument = DTE.ActiveDocument.Object("TextDocument")
                Dim StartPoint As EditPoint = txtDoc.StartPoint.CreateEditPoint
                Dim EndPoint As EditPoint = txtDoc.EndPoint.CreateEditPoint
                EndPoint.SmartFormat(StartPoint)
                ActiveWin.Close(vsSaveChanges.vsSaveChangesYes)
            End If
            ' Recurse if the project item has sub-items...
            Dim projitems2 As ProjectItems = ProjItem.ProjectItems()
            Dim notsubcoll As Boolean = projitems2 Is Nothing
            If Not notsubcoll Then
                SmartFormatProjectItems(projitems2, Level + 1)
            End If
        Next
    End Sub

End Module

Rafting on the Juniata River 2006

2006-07-11T10:18:00.000-04:00

This past weekend 74 fathers & sons traveled the Juniata River in homemade rafts. Our goal was to spend time with our sons in the outdoors, creating memories and learning to know them better. However, my 9-year old spent most of the time on the river swimming or on inner tubes like this one while my preferred place was on the raft! We took our neighbers, the Bergs, along as guests. It was a rough-and-tough father-son weekend and the boys loved it!

We even had a visit from the PA Game Commission to check if we had one life-vest per person. Thankfully, most of us did. The $70/person fines for those who were short was a test of character and submission to authority, for sure!

You can see all my digital pics at Flickr.

Visual SourceSafe RSS Generator Bug Fix

2006-01-08T20:12:00.000-05:00

I've downloaded Greg Reinacker's c# source to generate RSS feeds from Visual SourceSafe and improved it by reducing the working set. Following is the unified diff. (Be careful of wrapped lines when you select it into a text file.) If you need a tool to apply this diff, I recommend Tortise Merge which is a part of TortiseSVN which is a Windows shell extension for Subversion.


Index: GenRss.cs
===================================================================
--- GenRss.cs (revision 12)
+++ GenRss.cs (working copy)
@@ -91,29 +91,37 @@
     foreach (SourceSafeTypeLib.IVSSVersion ver in versions)
     {
      i++;
-     if (i > maxItems)
-      continue;
 
-     string action = ver.Action;
-     string file = ver.VSSItem.Name;
-     string user = ver.Username;
-     string vernum = ver.VersionNumber.ToString();
-     string comment = ver.Comment;
+     // Kevin Greiner  (2/22/2005) The following loop is
+     // specifically written to allow the foreach to completely finish. Testing has
+     // shown that aborting the foreach prematurely increases the working set
+     // 10-fold.
+     if (i <= maxItems) 
+     {
+
+      string action = ver.Action;
+      string file = ver.VSSItem.Name;
+      string user = ver.Username;
+      string vernum = ver.VersionNumber.ToString();
+      string comment = ver.Comment;
     
-     DateTime dt = ver.Date;
+      DateTime dt = ver.Date;
 
-     w.WriteStartElement("item");
-     w.WriteElementString("title", String.Format("{0}/{1}", action, file));
-     w.WriteStartElement("guid");
-     w.WriteAttributeString("isPermaLink","false");
-     w.WriteString(String.Format("{0}:{1}:{2}", file, vernum, action));
-     w.WriteEndElement();
-     w.WriteElementString("description", String.Format("{0}",comment));
-     w.WriteElementString("pubDate", dt.ToUniversalTime().ToString("r"));
-     w.WriteElementString("creator", "http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/", user);
-     w.WriteEndElement(); // item
+      w.WriteStartElement("item");
+      w.WriteElementString("title", String.Format("{0}/{1}", action, file));
+      w.WriteStartElement("guid");
+      w.WriteAttributeString("isPermaLink","false");
+      w.WriteString(String.Format("{0}:{1}:{2}", file, vernum, action));
+      w.WriteEndElement();
+      w.WriteElementString("description", String.Format("{0}",comment));
+      w.WriteElementString("pubDate", dt.ToUniversalTime().ToString("r"));
+      w.WriteElementString("creator", "http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/", user);
+      w.WriteEndElement(); // item
+     
+     }
+     
+     Marshal.ReleaseComObject(ver);
 
-     Marshal.ReleaseComObject(ver);
     }

Sold the cycle

2005-04-23T22:19:00.000-04:00

I sold the cycle last weekend. A young man bought it for his wife to ride. Talk about mixed feelings; I'm sad to see it go but it was definitely time. I just couldn't ride it anymore without being semi-paralyzed by considering the consequences of a serious wreck.

2005-04-23T21:27:00.000-04:00

A goofy grin! Remember being 8? My dad always told me not to make silly faces because my face might just *stay* that way....and I believed him, for a while anyway.

2005-04-23T21:12:00.000-04:00

An interesting, if cynical, view of project management and customer communications!

Dad's new old Christmas present

2005-03-18T06:49:00.000-05:00

Does Dad like his "new" Scout? Shortly after I was born in 1971, Dad bought a new blue International Scout 800B. When I was 17, he sold it because it was getting very rusty. Of course, now he wishes he had just put it in a barn somewhere!

A few months ago, my sister saw this 1970 800A Scout on her way to work. The children and Mom all went together to buy it for Dad's Christmas present. It took some work to get it hauled home and running. We had to rebuild the starter, install a new battery and mount a gas tank. But it was worth it. He was very pleasantly surprised.

For Sale: 2001 Suzuki SV-650S

2005-02-15T14:24:00.000-05:00

Yes, my motorcycle is for sale. It's a 2001 Suzuki SV-650S with 13,000 miles. I've had it for two years and it's time to move on. I've made a few cosmetic modifications to it like removing the rear fender, replacing the rear turn signals, and installing higher clipons from a Honda Hawk GT. The factory 12.5k service (adjusting the valves, basically) was done at the local Suzuki dealer, Trans-Am.

Visual SourceSafe and RSS

2005-02-15T06:32:00.000-05:00

I was looking for a way for Visual SourceSafe to tell me that someone has checked in changed files. I found SSMonitor (email notification) and Visual SourceSafe Journal Monitor Service (email, IM, or custom) but it was VSS RSS Generator that really delivered a great solution: an RSS feed that listed the check-in changes.

VSS RSS Generator runs as a Windows service (nice) but it's very CPU intensive (not nice), consuming about 1.5 minutes of CPU time per database per run. And I had to change some code in the inner foreach loop to reduce the memory footprint from 150MB to 15MB. But in general, it works very well.

The company I work for uses Bugzilla to track bugs and enhancements. In the check-in comments, we post either the bug number or a URL to the bug like: http://bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=1186. The next step is to autodetect these URLs and reformat to make them clickable from within an RSS reader.

I wonder if anyone else has taken the VSS RSS Generator's source and improved it? If so, we should talk. Drop me an email, please...

2004-12-30T07:24:00.000-05:00

What did Anika get for Christmas? A "sheep chair"?!? What aunt's don't think of! :)

Got a blank MSDN?

2004-12-14T11:49:00.000-05:00

So I finally get Visual Studio configured almost perfectly and what happens? My wireless flakes out and I had to reinstall Windows. Ugh. Visual Studio, MSDN 2003FEB, Office XP, and much more. Three days later, everything works again and it's even faster. Except that MSDN help is totally blank. No errors but no help either.

Neither Google's Groups nor Microsoft KnowledgeBase yielded a solution. So after various repairs and re-installs, I called Microsoft Support. Mr. Ted Bechel helped me out and we soon had a solution! And it was easy, if non-obvious. Here it is:

REGSVR –U C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Help\HXDS.DLL
REGSVR C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Help\HXDS.DLL

Nice job, Ted. Thanks again!

Visual Studio 2003 Solution's Active Item

2004-12-13T11:43:00.000-05:00

Like a commenter on Shaykatc's blog, I wanted a way to not have the Solution Explorer jump around but still easily scroll the Solution Explorer to the current file.

Turns out, it's pretty easy! Use Tools -> Options -> Keyboard dialog to bind a key to View.TrackActivityinSolutionExplorer. This toggles the setting so hit it twice to turn tracking off again.

VSFileFinder - version 3

2004-06-09T14:59:00.000-04:00

As mentioned on the Powertoys WebLog and on scooblog, VSFileFinder is a pretty neat tool for Visual Studio 2003.

June 1, Jonathan released a new version at Code Project (click on "New new version") that includes much better support for keyboard navigation. He also describes how to bind a shortcut key to display the window.

Back to work...

WinXP WiFi Hiccups Explained

2004-06-08T16:23:00.000-04:00

Yeah! I just love it when I find a fix to a maddening problem just by reading blogs. Like today, I was reading The Unofficial Microsoft Weblog and stumbled across an entry explaining a workaround for Windows XP's WiFi random disconnections.

And I thought it was my SMC 2804-WBR!

Details on source control in Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation

2004-05-28T12:20:00.000-04:00

Korby Parnell takes notes on Doug Neumann, the source control PM on the Visual Studio 2005 Team System team, at TechEd2004. He talked about how to manage software configurations with Visual Studio 2005. Lots of interesting details and a very new feature.

Although I think "shelving" could be easily handled in Subversion by using branches. In fact, I was talking to a team member just yesterday about switching away from VSS for precisely this reason. Daily checkins against one's private branch would be a very nice form of backup, too. Then when one is all done, merge against the head.

The magic of Edit.CycleClipboardRing

2004-05-25T20:55:00.000-04:00

I've been using various text editors (QEdit, The Semware Editor, Emacs) for, ummm, 15 years. And I learned something from each of them. I just love using a well-designed editor with a powerful built-in macro language. The ability to easily customize, extend, and automate the environment one spends 8+ hours a day using is underrated. There was a community around builing macros for TSE and there is one for Emacs as well. (People actually write email & NNTP clients inside these text editors!) But I've given up using these editors in exchange for the editor built into Visual Studio 2003. Why? Integrated building, source control, and debugging. I've learned to live with a dumbed-down editor and was content with that. Until today.

Today I found Edit.CycleClipboardRing (ctrl-shift-v) in Visual Studio 2003. And it awoke in me a dormant desire to customize Visual Studio's editor. I'm wondering why, among all the various .NET fansites, isn't there one that focuses on extending and customizing Visual Studio? Sure, there are a few blog posts around here and there but no central repository.

Hmmmm....

Visual Studio 2005 Team System not for individuals or small teams???

2004-05-25T11:52:00.000-04:00

Via Wesner Moise's blog, I ended up at the Visual Studio 2005 Team System FAQ. If you're interested in source control, as I am, scroll immediately to the very bottom and read the "Source Code Control" section.

I work on a small distributed team and we're ready to ditch SourceSafe for something more robust with a story for both multiple checkouts and WAN connections. With only 3.5 developers, we're not interested in scalability; we're interested in performance and features! Yeah, I tried all the VSS add-ons and they just didn't work well with multiple checkouts or Visual Studio 2003 integration.

Clearing Terminal Services Connections

2004-05-25T10:04:00.000-04:00

How to clear a hung Terminal Services connection? Particularly when *both* are hung and the both is miles away! I found the answer in this blog from Ingo Rammer. Interestingly, the solution Ingo found wasn't the easiest to use. I'm planning to use the technique mentioned in the second comment.

I wonder how often the real content of blog entries are not in the actual posts but rather in the comments? Pretty often, I'll bet. Again, this lends a lot of weight to the argument that rss aggregators should support the Comment API. We want conversation! How long until we'll need to support scoring the replies for relevance and/or value?

Visual SourceSafe is shrinking my pipe

2004-05-11T06:35:00.001-04:00

I work from home, connecting to our servers using DSL (512/256) and a VPN. Most of my develoment work is done in Visual Studio 2003 with Visual SourceSafe 6.0 (multiple checkouts enabled). The most annoying aspect of this setup is that any VSS interaction is very slow. I mean, is usually takes that long that I lose focus on my current task. Not good. So I've been looking at tools and techniques to help me work effectively.

Here are the options I've found so far:

a. SourceGear's SourceOffSite Classic ($239)
I used SOS at a prior job and found it to be quite functional and stable. It is the most expensive option of all the tools but is also the most effective. It's just to expensive for me, at the moment.

b. SCCBridge (free)
I've tried to use this tool several times but each time gave up due to a lack of robustness. It spits out very obscure messages and has a fairly difficult configuration process. When I finally got it working, the speed just wasn't much better, if at all.

c. VssConnect ($30)
I haven't actually looked at this product yet but intend to check out the eval version later this week. If their website is to be believed, it's precisely what I'm looking for!

d. Working disconnected (free, it's a feature of Visual Studio & VSS)
It just occurred to me yesterday that I could disconnect (File menu, Source Control, Change Source Control) from the VSS database and work offline. I'll post my observations on this technique separately.

Visual Studio 2003 - working disconnected from VSS

2004-05-11T06:35:00.000-04:00

I work from my home and connect via DSL (512/256) to a VPN where our servers are located. Most of my work is done with ASP.NET projects in Visual Studio 2003. Even with broadband access, Visual SourceSafe interactions are incredibly slow. So I've been looking into working disconnected (File menu, Source Control, Change Source Control) in an attempt to speed things up. We have multiple checkouts enabled.

1. Working disconnected is really nice. Adding new files, checking out, etc, is instant (< 1 sec). No more multi-second pauses waiting for the UI to respond when you start to change a file; you get a dialog box immediately.

2. When reconnecting, there are several dialogs that warn of potentially lost work. None of these apply to multiple check-out scenario's of course, but they still need to read and the correct button needs to be clicked.

3. One of the useful tasks that just can't be done when working disconnected is "undo checkout". You would either reconnect or use the VSS Explorer to retrieve the file contents via cut-n-paste.

4. The process of working disconnected requires 4 additional steps; 2 to disconnect and 2 more to reconnect. While the disconnecting step isn't too bad, the time VSS takes to reconnect is intolerable. In addition, the time isn't constant, as I've noted below. What was the difference? I don't think it was my network connection as I wasn't doing anything else and none of my other PCs were turned on. This is just too slow for me.

5. If I have time later this week, I'll check out the eval version of VssConnect. It only costs $30/developer and is specially designed to speed up VSS interactions over a WAN. http://www.vssconnect.com/VssConnect.htm

Connected Process
Time to load solution 2:16
Time to checkout 0:07
Time to checkin 0:09
Time to do get latest 6:30

Process to Disconnect
Time to load solution 2:16
Time to open VSS menu 1:45-3:29
Time to disconnect 0:05

Disconnected Process
Time to load solution 0:10
Time to checkout 0:01

Process to Reconnect
Time to open VSS menu 1:45-3:29
Time to reconnect 7:20
Time to do get latest 6:30
Time to checkin 0:08