Dan Maharry’s Blog

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The Client Side Is Now On Hold

Published on: 30/08/2011 21:00:00 by danm@hmobius.com

The Client Side is now on hold until such time as I can definitely commit the hour or two a day it takes to fill the firehose and generate the highlights of the day. I hope I will be able to make that commitment sooner rather than later.

In the meantime, thank you to the some 150 people who had already subscribed to this feed. I’m glad you thought it worthy enough to read.

Dan

The Client Side

Published on: 05/08/2011 13:27:00 by danm@hmobius.com

Trying to find a project which fits into baby-sleep-sized chunks has been a bit difficult of late. However, after a bit of trial and error, I’ve come up with The Client Side, a new link blog for client side development, in much the same view as The Morning Brew and Silverlight Cream. It’ll try and find as much current goodness on HTML5, CSS and Javascript development as it can. Please do visit and say hi.

Calling for Writers and Reviewers at DeveloperFusion

Published on: 31/05/2011 10:00:00 by danm@hmobius.com

It’s taken a little while to write this, but I’m happy to say that I’ve been offered and accepted the job of editor at DeveloperFusion. My new role will be to commission, edit and write new weekly – perhaps twice weekly if all goes well - articles for the site to go along with the news and roundups that are already put out frequently. Initially, I’ll be concentrating on .NET development topics as that’s what I know, but shortly I’ll be looking for articles and authors on many more topics – Apple, Ruby, Python, Perl, Architecture, Databases, Java and more.

I’ve already released two articles which you may be interested in:

These are the first two of a series of articles on Azure coming out in the next few weeks. We’ll also have some Windows Phone 7 stuff, F#, and a good helping of ASP.NET as well. Keep tuned to @developerFusion on Twitter and the article feed to keep pace with new articles as they are released.

We Need You

Of course, it goes without saying that we need your help to keep DeveloperFusion going.

If you’re a writer, experienced or wanting to write your first article, please get in touch and let me know. All the articles we publish are reviewed and edited before release so you’ll get some good feedback on your writing style, content and coding in return, as well as exposure to some 50,000 users who subscribe to our newsletter plus many more who come visiting in through the front door. And if you’d like to write but haven’t any preconceived ideas as to what to write about, we can help you with that too.

If you’d like to help but don’t want to write, perhaps you’d care to review an article or two for us. No matter your knowledge level, there’s likely to be something in the pipeline which your help will make better. You might be able to improve a writer’s code or say whether or not their article succeeds as a tutorial from your point of view as beginner yourself. Those who can, do, as they say.

Either way, please do get in touch. The email address is hello@developerfusion.com. I look forward to hearing from you.

Reflector Giveaway Wrap Up

Published on: 04/03/2011 14:00:00 by danm@hmobius.com

Well, all 50 Reflector 7 VS Pro licences have been sent off to their new owners. Thank you to everyone who entered and to those of you who didn’t, well it may have been worth your while to jot down some notes. First some stats about the giveaway.

The giveaway started on Friday Feb 11 and was publicized almost exclusively by twitter and those reading my RSS feed. Key people like Scott Hanselman and Jon Skeet retweeted its existence which helped no end, with 804 day 1 page views to the giveaway entry by the end of play. Chris Alcock was also kind enough to point out the giveaway the following Monday leading to another spike in interest of 204 page views that day. In total, there were some 1990 page views between start and finish of the giveaway with 1866 unique views according to Google Analytics.

So nearly 2000 people read about it and yet only sixty (yes, 60) people entered. You missed a great chance here everyone.

So What Is It Used For?

From those entries received, it seems that the most popular use for reflector is trying to figure out how Microsoft’s own code works. As one entrant wrote,

I am a SharePoint Developer.  ‘nuff said.

Indeed, this was not the only SharePoint developer entering the giveaway, although it was definitely the most succinct. Here’s a full list of those DLLs and applications that were mentioned in entries.

  • .NET Framework (unspecified) – 16
  • Non-MS Third Party Components – 9
  • ASP.NET – 7
  • SharePoint – 2
  • MS Dynamics – 2
  • WCF - 1
  • WPF – 1
  • Surface SDK – 1
  • Expression Blend – 1
  • Azure SDK 1.3 - 1
  • PowerGUI - 1
  • Telerik Sitefinity – 1
  • nHibernate – 1
  • MS Commerce Server – 1
  • MS Unlocker for WinPhone7 \ ChevronWP7 Unlocker – 1

Granted sixty people isn’t very representative of all developers out there, but maybe Microsoft are realising there is actually a call for good API docs and in-depth articles on how stuff works. I noticed that the ADO.NET team mentioned this apropos the forthcoming release of Entity Framework 4.1

We’ve held off on extensively documenting the CTPs because the API surface has been changing so much. RC will have intellisense and online documentation.

Something that Microsoft.Web.Helpers could do with for sure.

But figuring out a third-party DLL isn’t the only reason for using reflector. A number of you replied that Reflector had saved the day after a hard drive crash or disaster by source control failure of some kind. CW for example wrote,

I walked in to a new job a couple of years ago, within a few days I noticed that they had an issue with version control. There were 3 VSS databases and some other guy had decided to use CVS – just to add to the mix.

It became clear that the ‘old’ developers were happy with VSS and when it got a bit slow or crashed too much they would just setup a new VSS databases do some copy / paste of files and carry on. The CVS guy knew this was all bad and was trying to force everyone to ditch VSS and move to CVS. To add to the fun people had not used labels in VSS and there was also a culture of checking-in weeks or months after something was put into prod.

So – trying to work out where the current production code was held – or IF it was even held was a nightmare. Luckily for me everything was C# and they had not obfuscated any code.

Reflector to the rescue – every time I needed to make a change in production to something I had not worked on before I would reflect the current production binaries and then compare with what I could find in VSS or CVS. Even 3 years later I am still finding odd bits of code that I need to reflect – none of this would have been possible without Reflector.

Several entries also highlighted one or several of the plug-ins that Reflector now has via http://reflectoraddins.codeplex.com/ and the integration into Visual Studio that the recent Pro versions of Reflector have included.

Reflector has also used in a couple of more innovative ways by entrants.

  • It disassembles IL code back into C#, so a few developers use it to translate their VB code into C#.
  • As an obfuscation check. If Reflector crashes while trying to disassemble a DLL’s code, the developer takes it to mean that they have a good level of obfuscation applied to their code to hide it from casually prying eyes.

And to conclude, here is a list of useful projects that reflector has influenced and helped:

Reflector 7 Giveaway

Published on: 11/02/2011 11:00:00 by danm@hmobius.com

There’s been a great deal of discussion online recently about Redgate Software's decision to move their stewardship of Lutz Roeder’s Reflector software from a free \ premium model to a not-free \ premium model. The company’s Reflector forum is full of pleads, cajoles, reasonings and answers as to why a Reflector 7 licence will cost you $35 rather than $0 for v6. But when you come down to it, if you use Reflector in anger - and I’m sure many of us do – $35 is a small price to pay for the fantastic functionality it provides. And if you don’t already use it, then maybe I can help out.

Back on Feb 3, Jay Grieves bought ten Reflector 7 licenses with his own money to give them away. Redgate saw the post and offered another 50 licenses for his giveaway. If you didn’t notice it, that giveaway ends today so I’ve got in touch with Redgate and they’ve agreed to give me another 50 licenses to give away. However, rather than just post a comment below, I’d like to help others appreciate how useful Reflector can be.

So, please email me your favourite use for Reflector with examples and screenshots if you have the time and fifty people who send an email will get a Reflector 7 license free of charge. The address to send it to is HeresWhyILove-Reflector@yahoo.co.uk and the deadline is Monday February 28. I’ll post the best and most popular examples here next month.

Good luck

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