Author Archives: JohnHowell

After a huge effort to find the right path, the languages team have found a way to make the leap to the next generation of computing environments!  For anyone who wants performance and scalability you simply must checkout Herb Sutter’s … Continue reading →

When most development leads are pressing for unification of development methodologies, Ivar (one of the three behind UML) makes a good point against that.  This is definitely worth your reading time.

Yes, those wonderful power tools for VS are now updated!  Just released today.  Nothing huge, but lots of little things that make Visual Studio even better and easier to use.  Check it out here! Happy Coding!

If you’re like me, you were already using the 3.5 builds. They were pretty stable already. Bob Mensching posted on his blog not only about the final 3.5 release but also that they’re release cycles were really accelerating. This is … Continue reading →

When a fellow developer came over to talk about sending an email from his tool and I had forgotten this little hat trick.  When you need to pop up an email in the event your software needed to send you … Continue reading →

Just when I thought I had closed out my blog for the year, I stumbled across a post in the MSBuild forum.  Victor Chen is one of those forum monitors that knows his stuff inside and out.  He happened to … Continue reading →

I’ve been out of the office since December 16th and I thought I’d post another entry before 2010 ends.  2010 was a brutal year for a lot of people.   However, from a .Net front, it was very exciting.  Conversion to … Continue reading →

While converting a product from VS2008 to VS2010, I stumbled across a disparity between building in the IDE and building from the command line using MSBuild. Here was the scenario: I had a csproj (let’s call it MyLibrary) that had … Continue reading →

While working on a VS2008 to VS2010  conversion, I kept running into a problem where MSBUILD would literally blow up. I narrowed it down to the building of a particular MSI using WXS v3.5.  I had a repo!  I knew … Continue reading →

I often trouble shoot remote systems and in some environments and domains, viewing the EventLog thru MMC can be problematic.  In one particular environment, MMC will timeout or even hang 3 out of 4 tries.  While working on a better … Continue reading →