Category Archives: Development

Porting the SmartInspect library to .NET 2

In the last few weeks and months, there have been a lot of questions about our timeline to add support for the .NET 2 framework in SmartInspect. We therefore tested the current SmartInspect .NET library with the Beta 2 of .NET 2 and it turned out that it already works fine without changing anything (it […]

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Our dual screen setups here at Gurock Software

I finally had the time to add some photos to our articles. I originally planned to add them earlier but I never got around doing it.

Why Developers Need a Multi-Monitor Setup
Another photo has been added to Taking Advantage of Microsoft’s Empower for ISVs Program.

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Multi-monitor programming pitfalls

“I will highlight two problem areas where many programs, including popular ones, make wrong assumptions and therefore contain bugs on multi-monitor machines. In fact, we have been affected by one of these problems ourselves. A customer reported that the SmartInspect Console isn’t restored correctly when it’s closed on a non-primary monitor in maximized state. We […]

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Showing a vertical rule in Visual Studio

If you want Visual Studio to draw a vertical rule in the text editor just like Delphi does, then you’ve come to the right place. According to this posting, you can get one by simply adding a new value to the following registry key:
HKCU\\Software\\Microsoft\\VisualStudio\\7.1\\Text Editor
The value to add is a string called “Guides”. Now, just […]

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Creating custom exception in .NET

“Although the .NET framework contains all kinds of exception types which are sufficient in most cases, it can make sense to define custom exceptions in your own applications. They can greatly simplify and improve the error handling and thus increase the overall code quality. Whatever your reasons are for using custom exceptions, this article shows […]

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Vi emulation for Visual Studio

I finally found some time to install and test ViEmu, a vi emulation add-in for Visual Studio released two weeks ago. In case you don’t know what I’m talking about, this ‘vi’ thing is a very popular editor for Unix and Linux and ViEmu emulates its input model within the Visual Studio environment.
Although I use […]

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Enhancing code comments with voice recordings?

Yesterday I found a preview of an add-in for the Visual Studio family which lets you add voice recordings to your code comments. It’s called VoiceComments.
Here’s how it works. VoiceComments basically lets you record your voice and inserts a special link to the recording into your code. This link is a normal text comment and […]

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Screenshot of our build machine

After explaining the basics and technical details of our build system, I made a screenshot of our build machine in case you wonder how it looks like:

Click image for larger version

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Getting Microsoft dev and test licenses almost for free

“This means that for a software shop with five developers, it would cost USD $12,500 per year to get all the required development and testing licenses – and this doesn’t even include production licenses for a workgroup server or something similar. This is quite expensive for an early-stage ISV. But since Microsoft really wants you […]

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Explaining our build system – Part II

I previously explained the basics of our build system for SmartInspect. This part goes further and tells more about the technical details.
As mentioned, we just need to enter the `make’ command to start a new build. Make is a tool for automated builds created and maintained by the GNU project. The input for make is […]

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