.Net

Well, I’m speaking about a commercial product again. This time it’s about ANTS Memory Profiler (by Red Gate software, the ones that made .Net reflector). This product will help you identify any .Net memory leak you could have. The truth is, .Net never leaks but you can sometimes make stupid conception mistakes, like forgetting to remove references of some objects (that may contains heavy references themselves). The tool allows you to take snapshots of your running application and compare different snapshots. You can see the difference of memory consumption by some objets or the difference of class instance count. ...

This might seem like a quite complex thing to do, but it’s in fact very simple. Thank you .Net for being so well built. Note: With .Net 3.5, there is a much more advanced method called Add-In. But it’s also much more complex. You should use it on long-term projects with some evolutions of the plugins API (and no possibility to change the plugins). I’ve used it for a project and that really made us lose a lot of time. ...

Patrick Smacchia gave me a professional license of NDepend v2.12 so that I could write some stuff about it if I liked it. As it was a gift (yes it is), I decided to force myself to look into this software. And after having looked much of its functionalities, I kind of like it. It’s not THE ultimate tool you have to use, but it’s a little bit like the other (resharper, reflector, etc.), it gives you a better insight of what you have in hand. ...

I recently took the time to take a look inside the Microsoft.Sharepoint.dll using reflector. I’m not sure I have the right to do that. And I’m pretty sure I don’t have the right to publish any code extracted from it, so I won’t show any. Using SPSite(s) and SPWeb(s) If you do some timing on the SPWeb creation call (SPSite.OpenWeb), you will find out that it’s freaking fast (less then 1 ms on my server). The reason is that the most heavy object, the SPRequest class, is shared among SPWebs of a SPSite. The Dispose call only “Invalidate” the SPWeb, and if this SPWeb is the owner of the SPRequest (which is SPContext.Current.Web object in most of the cases), it releases it. ...

Yes, I have tested MonoVS with the version 0.2.2641 (on both client and server). I installed OpenSuse 11.1 and added the MonoVS software repository, and everything worked ! I would have prefer to get it from SVN in order to use it in my Debian hosts but the mono development team seems to have removed it from their SVN repository. So, the Mono Remote Debugger for Visual Studio works, but there still some bugs. Deployment is super fast and it copies all the required DLL. ...

.Net reflector is a really good tool. You can see the content of any assembly very easily. But it’s not really easy to see the full content of a class, or a library with it. The File Disassembler add-in is a totally crazy stuff. You can take any assembly and totally disassemble it. It even creates the .csproj so that you just have to open the project in Visual Studio. But don’t get too excited if the code is obfuscated you will get some “empty” methods with just this comment : ...

Just a little post for all these people who seem to think Mono is just an other short-term open-source software. I’ve used it for quite some time with a production “real time” network server, which is running for something like 6 months now, and it performs very well. I do everything on my Windows host and then copy and launch the final app on the Linux host. But there are still two problems : ...

Sharepoint debugging isn’t fully automated. So you should really know how to debug and diagnose your assemblies in any given situation. 1. Attaching to the process It only applies to a debugging environnement. This is the one that everybody knows (or should at least). You deploy your DLL in the GAC, restart your application pool, access your sharepoint web application in order to load the application pool and the DLL and then attach to the right w3wp.exe process (or every w3wp.exe process if you don’t really know which one to choose). ...

I’ve seen lots of Sharepoint software having an installation manual of at least 20 pages (sometimes 60). Most of the operations they describe could be fully automated. And these software were made by freaking big companies. They should be ashamed of themselves. Maybe they just forgot that computer science is all about saving some time (and not only making money). One good example is MOSS Faceted search 2.5 (I haven’t tested the 3.0). It takes at least 40 minutes to uninstall this crap. Why isn’t it just ONE WSP or at least one BAT file launching the WSP installation and the other steps ? Is there any real reason for that ? ...

There’s one little feature that you must have totally forgotten in the .Net framework, but it is great. We can tell our apps to download automatically some DLL we would expect to be in the GAC and that are not. This is one freaking great feature. Instead of forcing your users to install the librairies in their GAC or including the libraries with your applications, you can specify the URL(s) of the DLL(s) your software application depends on. When you launch your program, the .Net framework program will download them automatically if they’re not already in the GAC download cache. ...