FxCop Standalone for VS 2012, .NET 4.5 and Portable Libraries

In our current team environment we are using the VS 2012 Professional SKU with a MSDN subscription due to the cost savings it affords us.  That implies that we miss out on features like the integrated Code Analysis.  Up till VS 2010, Microsoft released an updated edition of the Code Analysis engine with the standalone FxCop installation.  That implied that even though we didn’t get the tooling integrated into Visual Studio directly, at least we could use the standalone edition of FxCop to execute the same set of Code Analysis rules on our code base - albeit in a bit more laborious fashion.

With VS 2012 Microsoft has not yet released an update to the standalone FxCop.  Here’s the MSDN forum post where I raised the issue as to when an update will be released.  The current standalone edition also doesn’t seem to support the new Portable Library format being used to cross target different .NET platforms.  Following the advise on the forum post I’ve created an UserVoice issue to request an update.  So if you are in the same boat as to using the standalone edition, please head over to UserVoice and go vote for the issue to get it resolved.  Thanks.

PS: Btw, if you would like to run the standalone FxCop in VS, you might want to consider the FxCop Integrator.  Haven’t used it, but it seems promising although there hasn’t been an update for a while.

Practical Performance Profiling E-book

The folks at RedGate, makers of some quality .NET and SQL Server tools like Reflector, ANTS Memory and Performance Profiler, SQL Monitor (and much more) have published an excellent, free book on performance profiling.  Practical Performance Profiling by Jean-Philippe Gouigoux seems like a wonderful comprehensive guide for improving application performance by understanding performance bottlenecks from every possible angle.   Do yourself a favour and register to get your own copy soon.  Happy profiling

Silverlight 5 Upgrade Woes

We recently struggled to upgrade the UI of On Key, Pragma’s Enterprise Asset Management System (EAMS) to Silverlight 5.  We struggled with getting Silverlight 5 binaries for a lot of the open source projects (Moq, Castle.Core), but it was the lack of development tooling support in Visual Studio 2010 that really disappointed us.  I can understand that the open source projects are slack in providing support for Silverlight 5.  We solved the problem by getting the source code and creating Silverlight 5 binaries ourselves.  However our hands are cut off when it comes the development tooling in Visual Studio.  Expression Blend 5 is still only in preview edition with no word on when a final version that supports the SL 5 RTW will be provided.  Code Analysis (FxCop) and Code Metrics analysis are broken for Silverlight 5 projects.  I find it very disappointing that MS didn’t make sure that all parts of the development tooling surrounding Silverlight 5 was working by the time that Silverlight 5 went RTW.  Hopefully these issues will be resolved soon, but one sort of gets the impression that with no more momentum behind Silverlight it might take quite a while

Elementary, my dear Watson

<rant> I don’t know about any other .NET developer out there, but I’m finding the current speculation with regards to what’s going to happen with vNext of the .NET developer tool stack to be totally frustrating to say the least.  This is causing so much angst and damage in the .NET developer community.  The uncertainty about what’s going to happen with technology stacks like SL, WPF etc. and the unwillingness of MS to be open about their future is killing a lot of momentum and goodwill and just adding more fuel onto the “oh-what-is-MS-up-to-now-again” discussions.  Yes, I know, all will become crystal clear at the BUILD conference somewhere in September, but why didn’t MS keep quiet until then?  Figure out what you want to do with the different technology stacks, restructure and get enough prototyping done BEFORE starting to communicate to the developer community.  Why even mention something like “HTML 5 and JavaScript is the way to go” with the first demo preview of Windows 8.  Surely MS should have expected the reaction by developers wanting to know what the future holds for the other technology stacks?  Anyway, I hope MS gets this right and that v1 of the next, seemingly consolidated UX platform, does not set us back another 2/3 years in waiting for it to become a really usable technology stack. </rant>

So until BUILD in September we are left to act as Sherlock Holmes – looking at information surfacing via leaked e-mails and other blog posts.  Alternatively we can just let it be and hope that everything will indeed fall together in a big “ah-hah moment” come September.  I just hope that an already fatigued .NET developer community will have enough energy left to buy into whatever MS is going to preach next and that it will be “Elementary, my dear Watson.  Elementary indeed.”  Time to get some rest before September then

Pragma On Key Silverlight Localization

One of the big features that we are adding to Version 5.4 of On Key, Pragma’s Enterprise Asset Management System, is the ability to use the system in different languages.  It seems like the first language we will support in addition to English will be Brazilian Portuguese  to support customers for our Pragma Brazil service company.  So I’ve been spending some time during the past week or two looking at the various aspects of On Key that we need to localize to determine the best solutions for getting everything localized.  In this post I will cover some useful information I discovered in my research.