The Future of .NET Reflector

Wednesday, August 20, 2008

After more than eight years of working on .NET Reflector, I have decided it is time to move on and explore some new opportunities.

I have reached an agreement to have Red Gate Software continue the development of .NET Reflector. Red Gate has a lot of experience creating tools for both .NET and SQL Server. They have the resources necessary to work on new features, and Reflector fits nicely with other .NET tools the company offers.

Red Gate will continue to provide the free community version and is looking for your feedback and ideas for future versions.

From: Simple-Talk Special Mailing [mailto:newsletter@simple-talk.com]
Sent: Thursday, 3 February 2011 01:08
Subject: Red Gate will be charging $35 for .NET Reflector

I've got a bit of an overload of "Unread or For Follow Up" items in Outlook at the moment => 149 to be precise. To tackle them I'm setting a "count down" schedule that is to finish by 1 October 2008. Every five days I need to make sure that the count is at or below the target number. I've popped my descending count into Outlook using the following PowerShell script.

$o = new-object -com Outlook.Application
$mapi = $o.GetNamespace("MAPI")
$cal = $mapi.GetDefaultFolder(9) # == olDefaultCalendar

$d1 = [DateTime]"1 oct 2008"
$d0 = get-date
$ticks=$d1.Subtract($d0).Ticks*5/151

$n=150
while ($n -ge 5) {
    $d0=$d0.AddTicks($ticks)
    $n-=5
    $appt = $cal.Items.Add(1) # == olAppointmentItem
    $appt.Start = $d0
    $appt.End = $d0
    $appt.Subject = "({0})" -f $n
    $appt.AllDayEvent = $true
    $appt.ReminderSet = $false
    $appt.Save()
}

I've been setting up the ability to post images with Windows Live Writer to this blog. My hosting service (Computer Image) have done a great job and it's now working just fine.

I love PowerShell. Every so often - tongue-in-cheek - Microsoft produces one very funky piece of technology. PowerShell is one such bit of goodness.

Well, now that I've installed 64-bit Vista on my Dell XPS I've noticed little things here and there that don't work like I expect. Most cases there's a good security reason. But sometimes it just that programs don't install properly.

PowerShell Community Extensions (PSCX) is one such beasty. There's a problem with the installer not configuring all the 64-bit stuff.

Luckily there's a quick solution.

Run this command:

C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v2.0.50727\InstallUtil.exe "C:\Program Files (x86)\PowerShell Community Extensions\pscx.dll"

For more info see: http://www.codeplex.com/PowerShellCX/WorkItem/View.aspx?WorkItemId=6949

Also, don't forget to set Remote Signing in both the 32- and 64-bit PowerShell interfaces.

I've been hearing a lot of good comments about Windows Live Writer lately. So far so good. It's figured out that I'm using dasBlog and I've had no errors. I've had trouble in the past with similar blogging apps. Will it publish?

The four main features of Object Oriented Programming - Inheritance, Abstraction, Encapsulation and Polymorphism - allow us to create applications where each class is nicely designed, easily tested, maintained and hence reusable across many projects. However, more often than not, the classes in our applications become tightly coupled and tangled with interdependencies, which in turn makes them difficult to test, maintain and reuse. Our applications become fragile and we lose much of the benefit of Object Oriented Programming.

The Dependency Injection Pattern (otherwise known as Inversion of Control) maintains louse coupling of the classes that depend on each other in our applications by "injecting" the dependencies at run-time rather than design-time. In .Net Dependency Injection makes great use of interfaces, thus promoting "Interface Driven Development" and/or "Test Driven Development", and facilitates many other Design Patterns such as Model-View-Controller, Model-View-Presenter, Factory Patterns, the Strategy Pattern, etc.

There are numerous Dependency Injection frameworks available for .Net – Castle MicroKernel/Windsor, Patterns & Practices ObjectBuilder, PicoContainer.NET, Puzzle.NFactory, Spring.NET, StructureMap, Ninject – but I’ve written my own. J

In this presentation, I'm going to demonstrate a couple of aspects of my Dependency Injection framework. There is far more in the total framework than can be discussed in 45 minutes, so I shall be cover the basics of "Interface Driven Development" and the use of "Abstract Factories" my framework to show how I can keep my classes loosely coupled and testable.

I'm going to aim to keep the presentation focused on the practical application of my framework, but there are some very funky "über"-cool coding techniques under-the-hood that would be great to discuss. So for those of you wanting to discuss the implementation of the framework in more detail I'm happy to do so after the presentation. (You can tell I'm proud of my creation, right?)

I got my hands on the new iRiver T60 MP3 player today.

It's pretty good.

I've only found a few issues that I would like to resolve, but it works very well for my podcast listening needs.

It'll resume from where it was turned off, it allows for copying of files to a USB Mass Storage drive, it will play the podcasts in the order that they are saved to the device.

The only two downsides so far is that setting the "Playback Speed" option to the fastest setting makes podcasts sound like I'm listening to the chipmonks, and every action seems to require the first button click to "wake up" the device and I need to then press the button again to make it do what I wanted. I can live with these issues.