01 Nov 2006
Originally posted on my old MSDN blog
Reasonably often I find myself writing a mini-test harness when I want to run a console application and time how long it takes.
I always end up looking back through old code to remember how to do it, so this makes it very suitable for posting here. It's not particularly revealing or complicated code, but hopefully it may save you a few minutes if you want to do the same thing.
Here's the code:
Stopwatch timer = new Stopwatch();
Process process = new Process();
// Set up the process information
ProcessStartInfo info = new ProcessStartInfo();
info.UseShellExecute = true;
info.CreateNoWindow = false;
info.WindowStyle = ProcessWindowStyle.Minimized;
info.FileName = "YourConsoleApp.exe";
info.RedirectStandardOutput = false;
process.StartInfo = info;
// Start the timer, and then the process
timer.Start();
process.Start();
process.WaitForExit();
timer.Stop();
Console.WriteLine("Running application took {0} seconds", timer.ElapsedMilliseconds / 1000);
01 Nov 2006
Originally posted on my old MSDN blog
As I've posted before, I really don't like the Visual Studio interface for running unit tests. This is mainly because it's not as clean (no hierarchy tree or big green line!), makes a copy of the files every time a test is run and is pretty slow (probably because of the file copies).
However I was very happy to find out the latest version of NUnit (http://www.nunit.org) supports Visual Studio Unit tests, so you can just point the Nunit GUI at VS Unit Test DLLs and run the tests there.
Both interfaces have their pros and cons, and I tend to go back and forth between VS (especially when debugging through the tests) and NUnit (when I want to run tests quickly) but it's definitely a big productivity gain being able to choose the most productive UI.
02 Mar 2006
Originally posted on my old MSDN blog
I'm now working on the Windows Live Expo team, which means:
- I might have some more interesting things to post on here :-)
- The focus of this blog may change a little
We shipped our first public beta yesterday (US only for posting at the moment, but open to all to view), so we can start talking about some of the cool technologies we're currently using.
We've also got a video on Channel 9 which gives a flavour of our technologies (filmed before I joined the team unfortunately)
Anyway on to the tip - I was shown this when talking to the dev team from the excellent Windows Live Local - which is particularly useful (and cool!) when in an area where the birds-eye view is available.
If you hold down the mouse scroll wheel and then drag a square on the map, you will zoom in to the area that you dragged over.
Just a small thing, but once you've tried it it really enhances the usability of the maps. Give it a try!
18 Feb 2006
Originally posted on my old MSDN blog
This one surprised me a lot when we found it. You can reboot a computer that is running IIS remotely by running the command:
iisreset [computerName] /reboot
It's been very useful today when we've been patching a whole rack of servers with security patches, but could be very dangerous in the wrong hands :-)
There are a few more interesting options available. Do iisreset /? for more details.
21 Dec 2005
Originally posted on my old MSDN blog
I had some strange issues on my laptop with Visual Studio 2005 - the delete and return keys didn't work, which made it somewhat tricky to write code. I even resorted to copy and pasting a new line when writing code, which as you can imagine wasn't very productive.
After much investigation, I solved the problem. I believe it started because I had previously installed an early beta of Visual C# Express, and there were still registry entries and Application Data left over even though I'd uninstalled. What this meant was I couldn't save any VS2005 settings, and this in turn was causing the editor problems.
My solution was:
- Delete any registry enries to do with Visual C# Express
- Delete any directories in My Documents related to either "Visual Studio" or "Visual Studio 2005" (obviously be careful with this if you've got any code you want to keep in here)
- Delete the contents of C:\Documents and Settings\<* user *>\Application Data\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0
- In VS2005, go to the Tools -> Import and Export settings… menu and Reset all settings
Other people appear to have had the same problem, but caused by something to do with Auto-hiding of windows capturing the focus when it shouldn't.
Some useful links that might help you if you're experiencing this:
