Not talking about the moles in my yard here. Moles is a new tool from Microsoft Research to aid in unit testing (also called Stubs). It allows for the runtime mocking of methods in any referenced assembly including assemblies in the framework. There is a pretty good demo of the Moles over on Channel 9.

I heard that Beta 2 was ready today and I just had to give it a try. I’ve been using it for a couple of hours now and I was beginning to think that they had solved the Beta 1 issues that caused Visual Studio to crash left and right. Really, Beta 1 should have never been released; it was unusable.

Unfortunately, Beta 2 is still very buggy and prone to crashing, saying it is better than Beta 1 would be true, but it still has a long way to go. The IDE cannot handle large solution/project files very well at all. Beware of the Beta. I still plan on using it for a few more days to see if I can find a way around some of these issues, but I’m concerned about the quality, or lack thereof, in the first two beta releases. I’m not ready to declare Beta 2 unusable yet, but it is definitely not at the quality level that I would expect from Microsoft.

Dev Div has given themselves ample time to get the product fixed with March 22nd being set as the release date, but I really wish they would have learned a lesson from the Windows 7 team about QA and release schedules. A number of the features in 2010 sound great, but at this point my faith is waning that the team can release a solid product. We might have to wait out until the first service pack before we can consider taking our team to 2010 unless Microsoft does some serious clean-up on Visual Studio 2010.

Just read the following on a blog here and immediately thought this would be a good way to test install software that you might not be all that sure of. Now I just need to find a way to go from vhd back to the physical PC to complete the circle. Windows 7 is supposed to be able to boot from a virtual, so that may be the way to go for the time being.

Windows only: Free Sysinternals application Disk2vhd takes a snapshot of your PC, and turns it into a Microsoft Virtual PC virtual hard drive—while your system is up and running.

Using the software, which requires no installation, is as easy as launching, selecting the drives you would like to create into a virtual disk, giving the file a name, and clicking the Create button. The utility uses the same volume snapshot feature that Windows uses for backup utilities, so it doesn't matter if software is running or not—but you'll have best results if you create the virtual disk on a separate drive.

Once you've created your virtual drive, you can use the free Microsoft Virtual PC to boot the image of your PC, which you can then use for testing, or just as a great way to completely backup your computer. Disk2vhd is a free download for Windows only.

I just read a postfrom Scott Hanselman that mentioned a tool that I hadn’t recalled hearing about before called the Fusion Log Viewer, also called the Assembly Binding Log Viewer. It appears to be available as part of the framework install. I found two instances of the executable on my development machine, both under C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows.

What is so special about Fusion Log Viewer? Well, not that much, but it could be helpful if you are having an issue with a wrong version of an assembly being loaded at runtime or an assembly not being found to load at runtime. Other tools such as .NET Reflector and Process Explorer can help you debug concrete references and what has already been loaded explicitly, but if you are doing dynamic assembly loading this tool may be useful.

The past couple of days I have been testing Beta 1 of Visual Studio 2010 Team System and have quickly realized that it is highly unstable and contains many frustrating bugs. If you are thinking about starting to use Beta 1, I would highly suggest holding off until Beta 2. Visual Studio 2010 appears to be in worse shape than the early releases of Vista; the complete opposite of my experience with the Windows 7 Beta release I might add.

So what have I seen that has caused me to come to the above conclusion:

1. Random crashes where Visual Studio disappears without a trace, no error messages. I have seen this several times converting solutions and projects from 2008 format to 2010, as well as, in the middle of compiling solutions.

2. C++ projects appear to be defaulted and fixed at “.NET Framework 4.0” which then causes it to be incompatible with 3.5 projects.

3. I have seen odd errors with project references not being picked up. I still have not gotten to the bottom of this one, although some of it is related to #2.

4. The Errors window does not always clear out between builds, leaving one thinking there are still errors after a successful compile.

5. Changes to Target Framework in Project Properties do not always save.

6. Project properties will not display at all for some normal C# assemblies.

I have every confidence that the DEV team at Microsoft will address these issues and many of the others, but for now, the Beta release of Visual Studio 2010 just is not ready for any real use other than playing around. It’s a Beta so that is to be expected. I just got my hopes up after how well Microsoft did with their Windows 7 Beta.

In addition to my previous post, I found another free stock photo site that looks promising called Stock Xchng.

Never know when I might need data recovery services, but came across the following tools over on Lifehacker.

TestDisk (Windows/Mac/Linux)

A powerful open-source tool for recovering your data. Not only can TestDisk perform basic file recovery like undeleting accidentally deleted files from FAT, NTFS, and ext2 file systems, but it comes with a host of additional functionality. With TestDisk you can recover your boot sector from a backup, rebuild your boot sector, fix FAT tables, fix your MFT, locate the ext2/ext3 backup SuperBlock, copy deleted files from partitions to recovery media, and find lost partitions in dozens of formats to help you locate your lost data. It's a command line tool, so there's no GUI, but the menus and the documentation in the wiki should get you started without much trouble.

Recuva (Windows)

A user-friendly Windows-based tool. When you run Recuva, you can resurrect missing files using either the file-recovery wizard or the application's manual mode. The file-recovery wizard is handy when you're sure your data is gone but you're not quite sure where it went or how to get it back. The wizard lets you narrow your search type to pictures, music, documents, video, or all files, and you can set the search location to everywhere on your computer, removable media only, in My Documents, the Recycle Bin, or a specified location. If you don't need the wizard you can jump right into manual mode and get to work searching where you know the file should be. Recuva uses a green/yellow/red light system to indicate how probable the recovery of your files will be, and when available, it can provide previews image files available for recovery. Recuva also includes a tool to securely wipe files you find, handy if you're attempting a file recovery just to ensure the files are actually dead and gone.

PhotoRec (Windows/Mac/Linux)

A companion program to TestDisk, also included in this Hive Five. Like TestDisk, this app is also devoid of a GUI, but likewise is quite powerful at file recovery. We're including PhotoRec independently of TestDisk because many users distinctly prefer PhotoRec as a safer alternative when deep disk recovery isn't necessary. This recovery tool won't mess with your partitions or help you rebuild your master boot record; it will, however, dive into your disks in a safe, read-only mode and ignore partitions and file systems in an effort to seek out your missing files. PhotoRec focuses on file types, is operating-system agnostic, and despite its name, isn't relegated to just photos. Overall, PhotoRec is a powerful tool for quickly and safely copying your deleted files to another disk.

Restoration (Windows)

A tiny, no-frills, portable recovery tool. You can use it in all versions of Windows and Windows file systems. It lacks some of the advanced functionality of other nominees but does have basic file-name search and the ability to sort by file parameters such as size and filename. Despite its tiny size, it performed just as well as the other nominees when tasked with restoring files from our test disks. Restoration weighs in at a mere 406k and would make a great addition to any Windows-based USB toolkit.

Undelete Plus (Windows)

Used to be commercial software but has gone on a lengthy "limited time offer" freeware run. This file recovery app works on all versions of Windows and incarnations of the FAT and NTFS file systems. Like Recuva, Undelete Plus assigns a recovery probability to files it finds based on how damaged the file is. You can sort files by type, set filters based on time and size to avoid sifting through every deleted file on your disk, and keep folder structures intact when you perform your recovery.

I ran across a tool today that I know I have looked for and wanted in the past: Applian. Honestly don’t have anything in mind to use it for right now, but next time I ‘need’ this I might give this app a try.

I finally decided to give up on the built-in Windows Notepad (I know, I know, a long time coming). I decided to go with Notepad2, but quickly ran into a couple of issues with replacing the built-in notepad so that Notepad2 would come up in its place. Here’s what had to happen:

1. Go to Windows\Notepad.exe, right click..Properties.
2. Go to Security tab, click Advanced.
3. Go to Owner tab..click Edit and select Administrators in “Change Owner to”. Click ok.
4. Go to Permissions tab..click Edit and select Administrators..click Edit..check Allow/Full Control. Click ok.
5. Repeat steps 1-4 for Windows\System32\Notepad.exe.
6. Rename both Windows\Notepad.exe and Windows\System32\Notepad.exe to Notepad_Original.exe.
7. Rename your desired notepad replace executable to Notepad.exe and copy the file to both Windows and Windows\System32.
8. Ah, you thought you were done? No, no, no, now we need to take care of the pesky “The publisher could not be verified” dialog box that appears every time that you try to run Notepad.exe now.
9. Run gpedit.msc.
10. Go to User Configuration\Administrative Templates\Windows Components\Attachment Manager.
11. Double-click “Inclusion list for moderate risk file types.
12. On the setting tab, ensure that the Enabled radio button is checked.
13. In the list of ‘moderate risk extensions’ type in notepad.exe. This is case-sensitive, so be sure that you have the correct name. A second option here is to just include all executables using *.exe.
    1. This policy setting allows you to configure the list of moderate risk file types. If the attachment is in the list of moderate risk file types and is from the restricted or Internet zone, Windows prompts the user before accessing the file. This inclusion list overrides the list of potentially high risk file types built into Windows and it takes precedence over the Low risk inclusion list but has a lower precedence than the High risk inclusion list (where an extension is listed in more than one inclusion list.)

cURL is the name of the project. The name is a play on 'Client for URLs',
originally with URL spelled in uppercase to make it obvious it deals with
URLs. The fact it can also be pronounced 'see URL' also helped, it works as
an abbreviation for "Client URL Request Library" or why not the recursive
version: "Curl URL Request Library".

The cURL project produces two products:
libcurl
A free and easy-to-use client-side URL transfer library, supporting FTP,
FTPS, HTTP, HTTPS, SCP, SFTP, TFTP, TELNET, DICT, FILE, LDAP and LDAPS.
libcurl supports HTTPS certificates, HTTP POST, HTTP PUT, FTP uploading,
kerberos, HTTP form based upload, proxies, cookies, user+password
authentication, file transfer resume, http proxy tunneling and more!
libcurl is highly portable, it builds and works identically on numerous
platforms, including Solaris, NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Darwin, HPUX,
IRIX, AIX, Tru64, Linux, UnixWare, HURD, Windows, Amiga, OS/2, BeOs, Mac
OS X, Ultrix, QNX, OpenVMS, RISC OS, Novell NetWare, DOS and more...
libcurl is free, thread-safe, IPv6 compatible, feature rich, well
supported and fast.

curl
A command line tool for getting or sending files using URL syntax.
Since curl uses libcurl, it supports a range of common Internet protocols,
currently including HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, FTPS, SCP, SFTP, TFTP, LDAP, LDAPS,
DICT, TELNET and FILE.