If you’re interested in Visual Studio 2005, and especially ASP.NET 2.0, visit this site: https://beta.asp.net/ It’s an official Microsoft beta site running ASP.NET 2.0. Including forum, a control gallery, tutorials, starter kits and many more!
We finally made the change to Community Server here at bloggingabout.net. Because of this, some stuff will change. One of them is the appearance of all the blogs. And I’m not entirely happy with the way my blog is looking right now. I guess it takes some getting used to. Maybe I’ll switch a little the next days. If you think I should keep a certain skin (or loose it!): drop me a comment…
Microsoft's CLRProfiler is a tool you can use to analyze the behavior of your managed applications. I've used it a number of times and it can be pretty helpfull in profiling your apps. According to Microsoft, these are its strengths and weaknesses:
Highlights
<LI class="MsoNormal">
<SPAN lang="EN-US">Which methods allocate which types of objects?</SPAN><br /> <LI class="MsoNormal">
<SPAN lang="EN-US">Which objects survive?</SPAN><br /> <LI class="MsoNormal">
<SPAN lang="EN-US">What is on the heap?</SPAN><br /> <LI class="MsoNormal">
<SPAN lang="EN-US">What keeps objects alive?</SPAN>
</LI></UL>
<br /> <LI class="MsoNormal">
<SPAN lang="EN-US">Additionally:</SPAN><br /> <UL type="circle">
<br />
<LI class="MsoNormal">
<SPAN lang="EN-US">The call graph feature lets you see who is calling whom how often.</SPAN><br /> <LI class="MsoNormal">
<SPAN lang="EN-US">Which methods, classes, modules get pulled in by whom</SPAN>
</LI></UL>
<br /> <LI class="MsoNormal">
<SPAN lang="EN-US">The tool can profile applications, services, and ASP</SPAN><SPAN lang="EN-US">.NET</SPAN><SPAN lang="EN-US"> pages.</SPAN><br /> <LI class="MsoNormal">
<SPAN lang="EN-US">The tool can control profiling:</SPAN><br /> <UL type="circle">
<br />
<LI class="MsoNormal">
<SPAN lang="EN-US">You can add comments that can also serve as time markers.</SPAN><br /> <LI class="MsoNormal">
<SPAN lang="EN-US">You can turn allocation and call logging on or off.</SPAN><br /> <LI class="MsoNormal">
<SPAN lang="EN-US">You can trigger a heap dump.</SPAN>
</LI></UL>
<br /> <LI class="MsoNormal">
<SPAN lang="EN-US">The log files produced are self-contained – you do not need to save symbol files and the like to later analyze the log file.</SPAN><br /> <LI class="MsoNormal">
<SPAN lang="EN-US">There is also a command-line interface allowing log files to be produced in batch mode.</SPAN>
</LI></UL>
<br /> <P class="MsoNormal">
<SPAN lang="EN-US"><A name="_Toc54579204"><STRONG>Lowlights</STRONG></A></SPAN>
</P>
<br /> <UL type="disc">
<br />
<LI class="MsoNormal">
<SPAN lang="EN-US">CLRProfiler is an intrusive tool; seeing a 10 to 100x slowdown in the application being profiled is not unusual. Therefore, it is not the right tool to find out where time is spent – use other profilers for that.</SPAN><br /> <LI class="MsoNormal">
<SPAN lang="EN-US">Log files can get huge. By default, every allocation and every call is logged, which can consume gigabytes of disk space. However, allocation and call logging can be turned on and off selectively either by the application or in the CLRProfiler UI.</SPAN><br /> <LI class="MsoNormal">
<SPAN lang="EN-US">CLRProfiler cannot “attach” to an application that is already running.</SPAN>
</LI></UL>
<br /> <P class="MsoNormal">
<SPAN lang="EN-US"></SPAN><SPAN lang="EN-US"><A name="_Toc54579205"><SPAN lang="EN-US"><STRONG>Internals overview</STRONG></SPAN></A><SPAN lang="EN-US"></SPAN></P><br />
<UL type="disc">
<br />
<LI class="MsoNormal">
<SPAN lang="EN-US">The tool uses the public profiling interfaces that the CLR exposes. These work by loading a COM component that then gets called whenever a significant event happens – a method gets called, an object gets allocated, a garbage collection gets triggered, and so on. </SPAN><br /> <LI class="MsoNormal">
<SPAN lang="EN-US">The COM component writes information about these events into a log file (such as “C:WINDOWSTemppipe_1636.log”).</SPAN><br /> <LI class="MsoNormal">
<SPAN lang="EN-US">The GUI (Windows Forms application) analyzes the log file and displays various views.</SPAN>
</LI></UL>
<br /> <P class="MsoNormal">
<SPAN lang="EN-US">I also found <A href="https://msdn.microsoft.com/msdntv/episode.aspx?xml=episodes/en/20030729CLRGN/manifest.xml">this video</A> about the CLRProfiler, but I haven't had time to watch it yet...</SPAN></SPAN>
</P></p>
Last weekend I went to see the musical Hair at the Stadsschouwburg in Eindhoven. It was played by an allmost all American cast: only the male lead was a Dutch guy, if I understood correctly. (Normally the female lead was Dutch too, but that role was played by someone else last saturday.) And I have to say: it was really great! Unbelievable vocals, great play and a pretty cool way to bring all those long forgotten beautiful songs back to life (Aquariuuuuus). Unfortunately last sunday was the last performance, so I would say ‘go see it’ but that’s not possible. It was their last performance in The Netherlands last sunday.
This one is actually quite simple: Crystal Reports supports exporting to a PDF. Exporting can be done to disk, or to a stream. And a stream can be written to the Repsonse property of a page. And there you go 😉
View the interview Channel 9 had with Microsoft’s CEO: Steve Ballmer. The interview in short:
_Why does Microsoft care about developers?
01:11 Why does Microsoft have an evangelism team?
01:48 What is your call to action for developers right now?
02:44 Microsoft is a leader in transparency and blogging. Why did you allow blogging?
03:38 Time for some tough questions. On the blogs there are those that say that Microsoft doesn’t innovate, can you give us some examples of where Microsoft is innovating?
05:42 Coming up with tough questions for you is hard. If you were in my position what tough questions would you ask Microsoft’s CEO?
07:22 Since a lot of Microsoft employees watch Channel 9, what would you say to all the Microsoft employees around the world?
08:48 What do you want to be remembered as?
This Microsoft sites makes it possible to enable ClearType fonts in Windwos XP from a web interface (using Internet Explorer). Neat! There’s a powertoy available also…
ClearType is a special way of displaying fonts that makes fonts stand out more on LCD screens. It’s almost as if you’re looking at a piece of paper with the words printed on it. Click here for more information on ClearType.
My last message was about this strange error I received. Today I got it again, which led me to believe a hardware failure was not the reason. So after some more investigation I found out Index Server was to blaim. Taken from support.microsoft.com (click here for full article):
I’ve been using skmmenu for quite a while now, and I think it’s great! But last Friday I was fooling around in Visual Studio, trying to make some fun stuff in ASP.NET, when I got a strange error about a reference. The information part:
Soon bloggingabout.net will switch to new (and better) blogging software. Because of this, the URL to my blog (and any other blog at bloggingabout.net) will change. In stead of bloggingabout.net/username, all blogs will become available through URLs like bloggingabout.net/blogs/username. Don’t worry if you can’t remember: the old URL will keep working for a while: it will redirect to the new one. I’ll keep you posted when the change is going to be done.
Although we’re not using SourceSafe at my current project (yet), I found out about a cool feature recently: Keyword Expansion. It enables you to get information about the revision, date, author and so on of the version of the file you are looking at inside the file itself. This way you can see version information in the comments of your code-file, without even starting SourceSafe.
The default ComboBox has some weird characteristics…
We created our own control which derives from the ComboBox because we wanted to create a ComboBox where the user could type (parts of) the value he or she wants to select, but would not be able to type something that was not in the list. So that’s kind of a combination between the DropDownStyles DropDown and DropDownList. The basics weren’t that complicated, so we created the controls pretty fast. But then came the next step: fine-tuning.