Here are a few new tools that I have been using over the past few months which are all very useful. Thanks to my colleague Neil Schulman for recommending ReSharper which is a C# refactoring and intelligent code assisting tool which integrates with Visual Studio 2005. ReSharper is great for showing where errors exist in your code and pointing out where optimizations can be made. ReSharper also has extended Visual Studio intellisense capabilities which alone are worth the install. I personally love the closing brace identifier feature which highlights the closing or opening brace for any that you click on.
Another tool I have been using to assist with my BizTalk SFTP adapter work has been FileZilla. Many of you may already be familiar with this handy opensource FTP utility which provides the ability to do SFTP transfers as well!
Thanks to Marina for recommending SmartAssembly which looks to be a useful .NET obfuscation tool although I haven't yet given it a try :)
Over the past few weeks we have been experimenting with several new or newly discovered development tools where I work. At the top of my list is Roland Weigelt’s GhostDoc, which I found one day while watching a podcast. It has been a great success here and has saved us all lots of time away from tedious xml comment authoring. GhostDoc has VS 2003 and VS 2005 versions that you can download, install, and run side by side. To use just right click a method or property and choose “Document This” and watch as the xml comments are generated. Of course you still must review these for accuracy and clean up any mistakes.
Another really neat tool we have been experimenting with is CruiseControl. Billed as a framework for a continuous build process this is a wrapper tool for controlling your entire build and deployment process. You can set it up to pull your code from source control and then call out to your build tool for compilation whether it be Nant, MSBuild, or a variety of others. You can also have conditional emails sent to notify you of build events.
Finally I would like to say that all developers need a desktop search tool such as Google Desktop or MSN Desktop search. Both of these tools will take a few hours to index your machine but afterwards you will have instant as you type search capability of your hard drive files and all emails! These tools are must haves and blow away the worthless built in windows search tool in my opinion.
The best thing about all of these tools is they are all absolutely free! If you have tools that your shop loves feel free to post them here.
Tonight I tried to add Google's AdSense search code to the right nav area on my site. According to the Google AdSense site all I should have to do is paste the google script code in my page. The problem was that Google's script is an HTML form.
This obviously didn't work because of the problems with nested form tags in an ASP.NET page. Here is how I ended up getting around this. I moved the above code into it's own html file you can view here. Then in my right nav ascx file I included the following iframe code which loads the html page in the frame and allows the form to post as intended:
<IFRAME name=SearchFrame src="pt_google_search.htm" frameBorder=0 width="98%" scrolling=no height=112>
<a href="pt_google_search.htm">Search Page</a>
</IFRAME>
This is also a useful technique to use with some PayPal scripts which run in an HTML form.
Recently as I have been learning more about BizTalk I decided to explore the FTP adapter that comes packaged with BizTalk 2004. This adapter is easy to setup and use as demonstrated here. First create a receive port and add a file receive location to drop messages for later pickup and ftp. Next create a send port with a filter to pickup the dropped message for delivery. Choose FTP as the send port's primary transport type as seen here:
The ellipse in the Address(URI) field opens the FTP transport properties dialog seen here with necessary parameters filled:
The most important properties being the target ftp site host address in the "Server" parameter. Next would be the account used to log in to the ftp site as "User Name" and that accounts password is the "Password" field. I also chose to put create a local log file of all activity through the send port by adding a local file path in the "Log" parameter. The FTP adapter also has a guaranteed delivery feature that is detailed in this post on Charles Young's BizTalk blog which can be utilized by setting the "Temporary Folder" parameter under tuning parameters. Test by dropping a file in the file receive location folder and it should be picked up and sent via ftp to the destination ftp site. Simply refer to the log file created to confirm or trace problems. I hope to have a post in the near future on using the /n Software SFTP adapter.
My name is Adam Beal and I am a Software Engineer for Edfinancial Services in Knoxville, TN. I also own and develop my own site ProgrammingTutorials.com where I post collections of beginning level programming tutorials I find on the net. My current passion is anything related to BizTalk 2004 or 2006 or the Business Rules Engine. I will also be posting on many other miscellaneous .NET 2.0 related topics including ASP.NET. As my BTS development skills grow I will post the lessons learned and maybe some simple helpful posts here to share with others.