Monday, January 24, 2005

Snippet compiler

Snippet Compiler v 1.11

The Snippet Compiler is a small Windows based application that allows you to write, compile, and run code. This tool is useful if you have small pieces of code ( lets say to test a small piece of code ) for which you don't want to create an entire Visual Studio .NET project .The following features you will get from this tool.

ü Compiles and runs single or multiple C#, VB.NET and ASP.NET snippets.

ü Optionally builds WinForm EXEs, console EXEs or DLLs.

ü Displays compile errors and warning, including wave lines in editor with error/warning tooltips.

ü IntelliSense for static members and method signatures, as well as constructor signatures.

ü Imports VS.NET projects.

ü Conveniently sits in the notification area waiting to be useful.

ü Exports snippets to HTML/RTF

Check out the screen shot of snippet compiler UI



To run the snippet code just press the play button (green triangle marked with red circle ) and it will run in debug mode.If you want to test some code very quickly I suggest use snippet compiler and its available at your system’s notification area and easy to access and run this tool. Snippet Compiler was written by Jeff Key and can be downloaded from http://www.sliver.com/dotnet/SnippetCompiler/

Friday, January 21, 2005

IIS 7 - Longhorn

IIS 7

I have been looking at IIS 7 and reading up on this. This is the next version of IIS and supposed to ship with the next version of the OS, Longhorn (Not sure if it will ship with the client edition also, or only the server edition).

Major enhancements to the HTTP pipeline means that ASP.NET is integrated much lower into the base. This means you can write the equivalents of an ISAPI filter in Managed code. IIS also now understands web.config. This means your ASP.NET and IIS share a single configuration repository, which is good news for the developers. They also share your authentication and autherization settings. Now you get real xcopy deployments for your web sites.

Thursday, January 20, 2005

Why the name Whidbey for VS 2005?

The versions of Visual Studio stand for cities/islands in the Northwest that are near to Redmond, WA.

** Codenamed - Everett - Visual Studio .NET 2003 - Everett is a city north of Seattle.

** Codenamed - Whidbey - Visual Studio 2005 - Whidbey is an island north of Seattle, which is nearer to Everett.

** Codenamed - Orcas - Visual Studio 20XX - Orcas is an island in the San Juan group of islands even further north of Seattle.

** The next version of Windows (Codenamed - Longhorn) Longhorn is a bar close to Whistler and Blackcomb ski resorts."

Wednesday, January 19, 2005

Shadow Copies and Restarts

Once an assembly is loaded into an AppDomain, there is no way to remove the assembly from the AppDomain. It is possible, however, to remove an AppDomain from a process.

If you copy an updated dll into an application’s bin subdirectory, the ASP.NET runtime recognizes there is new code to execute. Since ASP.NET cannot swap the dll into the existing AppDomain , it starts a new AppDomain. The old application domain is “drain stopped”, that is, existing requests are allowed to finish executing, and once they are all finished the AppDomain can unload. The new AppDomain starts with the new code and begins taking all new requests.

Typically, when a dll loads into a process, the process locks the dll and you cannot overwrite the file on disk. However, AppDomains have a feature known as Shadow Copy that allows assemblies to remain unlocked and replaceable on disk.

The runtime initializes ASP.NET with Shadow Copy enabled for the bin directory. The AppDomain will copy any dll it needs from the bin directory to a temporary location before locking and loading the dll into memory. Shadow Copy allows us to overwrite any dll in the bin directory during an update without taking the web application offline.

Friday, January 07, 2005

Where did the term cookies come from?

A cookie is a well-known computer science term that is used when describing an opaque piece of data held by an intermediary. The term fits the usage precisely; it's just not a well-known term outside of computer science circles.