6 posts tagged “visual studio”

Svn Version Tasks

Nov 4, 2009
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There is now an open source release on CodePlex for a subversion based assembly version management library that leverages MSBuild Tasks for automation. What this provides is a way for you to integrate version management on your Visual Studio Projects and automatically ensure that the SVN Revision number is attached to the assembly version.

For instance, if you commit and have a clean working SVN directory on revision 1234 your version number on your assembly file will be (once you build the project):

1.0.0.1234

The MSBuild tasks will ensure that the version is updated before compiling and then revert that change in the assembly info file. It will always maintain the major and minor numbers set by the original source but it will update the build and revision number using the format:

Major.Minor.(Revision Number Digits Length - 4 or 0).(Last 4 Digits of Revision Number)

Check it out by going to the link below:

http://svnversiontasks.codeplex.com/

.NET 1.1 in Visual Studio 2008

Aug 8, 2009
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Everyone who regrets installing Visual Studio 2003 can take pleasure in knowing there is an alternative. There is an MSBuild Extension called ‘MSBee’ that was built to manage building applications using Visual Studio 2005 projects that target .NET 1.1. Moving forward to use Visual Studio 2008, there is an extension to that called CrossCompile.CSharp.targets and CrossCompile.CSharpWeb.targets

Referencing article: http://devlicio.us/blogs/ziemowit_skowronski/archive/2008/08/22/working-with-net-1-1-in-visual-studio-2008-and-team-server.aspx

From that, it is possible to create a Visual Studio 2008 Project and ensure that it compiles directly to .NET 1.1 Assemblies.

Setup:

Download MSBee and install it (make sure you install the .NET Framework 1.1 and the .NET Framework 1.1 SDK): http://www.codeplex.com/MSBee

Download CrossCompile and export the targets to your %Program Files%\MSBuild directory.

http://www.gl-net.org.uk/Files/CrossCompile.zip

Take a look at that article on how to take an existing project and ensure that you can convert it for Visual Studio 2008.

New Class Library Project Templates

Or if you happen to need a new project, I have created a Visual Studio Templates just for that: http://nyxtom.googlepages.com/ClassLibrary-Net.1.1.zip

Note about adding additional references: Your project is set to .NET 2.0 so by default it any additional references added are only going to show as 2.0 References. To fix this, (say you add System.Web.Services) unload the project, edit the .csproj file and find the section that indicates a ‘HintPath’. You can either specify the .NET 1.1 Framework HintPath or delete the HintPath altogether. Without the hint paths, Visual Studio will assume .NET 2.0 and thus give you the ability to write 2.0 code; however any 2.0 based code you do write will cause a compiler error as it isn’t supported by the .NET 1.1 CSC ran by CrossCompile and MSBee.

Enjoy J

Leveraging Post Builds to do your bidding

Apr 28, 2009
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Every now and then it's always nice to have a little system of automation to ease your way into deployment, packaging and all sorts of interesting things. To do so, all you have to do is dance dance! :D

Just kidding, but seriously, let's take a few looks at how you can automate those visual studio projects of yours.

Lesson 1: Post Build Packaging

In every single project in your solution you can add post and pre-build events. What are these? Whenever you do a CTRL+SHIFT+B you are doing a build. When the C# Compiler (CSC) and Visual Studio come to your project, pre-build events will fire off before it starts to compile it, after it compiles it to the executing folder the post-build events will fire.

You can setup your post-build events to occur on every successful build or to just when the build updates the output.

You can run anything that the command prompt can run here. Some useful things I've done up to the latest projects I've been working on include:

Copying the target directory to a deployment folder: copy "$(TargetDir)" "$(SolutionDir)Deployment\"
Copying the target path to the deployment folder: copy "$(TargetPath)" $(SolutionDir)Deployment\"

Running a script to cleanup the leftovers:
Within a bat file you can select all the directories within a directory where the given name appears:

FOR /F "tokens=*" %%G IN ('DIR /B /AD /S bin') DO RMDIR /S /Q "%%G" FOR /F "tokens=*" %%G IN ('DIR /B /AD /S obj') DO RMDIR /S /Q "%%G"

Running a script to stop a service, uninstall it and then re-install it, and finally start it.
net stop MyServiceName
installutil -u Location\To\MyService.exe
installutil Location\To\MyService.exe
net start MyServiceName

The nicer part of build events are the macros that are available. Click edit Post-build (or pre-build), then select macros on the dialog. You can then use those for those forementioned scenarios I listed. As long as the things you want to leverage from the command line are on the Path then you can execute them as needed. If they're not, well then you can always just add them in a script file :)

Adosi Audio Starter Kit

Mar 9, 2008
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In the absence of my coding articles I have created a starter kit for creating audio-visuals with the Bass.NET API. With this starter kit you will be able to have a nice starting point to work with Bass and different audio-visual techniques. The kit, once installed, can be run by hitting F5. You can immediately load up any of your favorite songs or a simple Shoutcast playlist. In a few of my future articles I will introduce some techniques for creating audio-visuals including: bars, waves and ambient lighting. Let's take a quick look at Adosi from where it stands.

Adosi-Starter

Go ahead and download the visual studio template installer from below:

Adosi Audio Starter Kit

Make sure that you have the following requirements before installing:

The Player
When you first start the program you will notice some of the interaction and animation touches that have been made. The entire interface has been designed so that when any audio-visual is added, any one of the components can be apart of the addition. There isn't much to it at this point, but we can however use it as a nice starting point. Let's go ahead and start modifying it. We are going to attempt to wire the bars-visual to the actual music.

Bars Audio-Visual
Before we can create our own audio-visual, we must first understand how most audio-visuals actually work. The idea is based on tracking two distinct variables in all audio: frequency and amplitude. In our case, to create an equalizer all we need to do is average amplitude values into a number of sections. The Bass api contains a simple method for obtaining all this data in the following snippet:

Bass.BASS_ChannelGetData(handle, buffer, length);

The first parameter refers to audio stream handle (known whenever you create a new channel stream) while the second parameter should be the buffer array created to hold the data itself. It's usually best to use a float array here but you can place doubles, bytes, ints or an IntPtr. The last parameter is the length of the data to receive from the stream. The best place to determine this amount is by using the following snippet:

BASSData.BASS_DATA_FFT2048
- you can use any of the given values in the enumeration. Note the actual length in the comments (where 2048 FFT actually refers to 1024 allocated to a single buffer.

All you need to do to create the equalizer is create averages for the number of bars you want. Go ahead and check out the download for the completed version of the equalizer in my modifications below. The equalizer is the easiest to create, so in the future we'll have to get a little more serious in our visualizations.

[Download my version here]

.NET Source Code available in VS2008

Jan 17, 2008
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If you haven't heard already, Scott Guthrie posted on his blog that the .NET Framework Source code is now available to browse and debug in Microsoft Visual Studio 2008. You can debug and browse for the following:

.NET Base Class Libraries (including System, System.CodeDom, System.Collections, System.ComponentModel, System.Diagnostics, System.Drawing, System.Globalization, System.IO, System.Net, System.Reflection, System.Runtime, System.Security, System.Text, System.Threading, etc).

ASP.NET (System.Web, System.Web.Extensions)

Windows Forms (System.Windows.Forms)

Windows Presentation Foundation (System.Windows)

ADO.NET and XML (System.Data and System.Xml)

There is a plan to release the source code for additional framework libraries such as: Linq, WCF and Workflow. This is most exciting! Now I can debug against all the networking code I want, threading, drawing the works!

Neumont ORM Humor

Aug 15, 2007
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As a quality assurance developer for NORMA (Neumont ORM Architect for Visual Studio) this quarter I get the priveledge of working in many, many... many different orm models for test cases. So I thought I'd share some of the humorous models that have come up over time.