November 2007 Entries

Windows Live Writer

Finally the latest version of windows live writer seems to work with my blogging engine. Seems they have made some updates to allow blogware engine support for categories etc. Or maybe I just missed these on previous releases. Anyhoo, looks good.

Visual Studio 2008 RTM'd

....and commence downloading. http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/11/19/visual-studio-2008-and-net-3-5-released.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar/archive/2007/11/19/visual-studio-2008-and-net-framework-3-5-shipped.aspx  

TFS: Work Item Search

I've been using this plugin now for the past few months. You would not believe the difference it makes. This plugin puts a little search box right into Visual Studio to make it easy to find work items.  It is an addin for Team Foundation Client (Team Explorer) and is accessible from the Team menu when you're connected to a Team Foundation Server and is also avalible from a VS Toolbar.  You just type in some search text and it runs a work item query for you showing you results across the work item store. Source: Codeplex project "Search Work Items"

HeadMelter of the week - Self-Constrained Generic Base Classes

Melted my own brain for a few hours with this one today. Essentially a self-constrained generic base class looks like the following.     public class MyEntity : EntityBase<MyEntity> {     }   This allows me to put some generic implementations in a base class for code that I would simply duplicate otherwise. For example:       public class EntityBase<T> : IEquatable<T>, IComparable<T>     {         public int CompareTo(T other) {             // Insert compare code here           }           public bool Equals(T other) {             // Insert Equality Code Here         }     }   Enjoy!