Scott Hanselman

This just went out.  Today CheckFree completed acquiring Corillian. It started in February, and the acquisition phase is complete. Now the real work starts.

In the press release, this sentence struck me:

The combined organization will have the potential to provide a market-leading, fully integrated, secure and scalable online banking, electronic billing and payment platform. Together, CheckFree and Corillian’s platforms serve 21 of the top 25 financial institutions, more than 40 million online banking consumers, more than 31 million electronic billing and payment consumers, and more than 250,000 small businesses.

It's going to be interesting as our little 300 person company becomes part of a 3000+ person company, but the potential for good that we can do is so much greater as one entity. We'll be learning about the new organization and how we fit into it in the coming months. I visited the campus in Atlanta, Georgia and got to hang out with a number of the key players working on the integration and I can attest to the coolness of their corporate culture. We'll see what tomorrow will bring. Wish me luck.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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Hopefully if you've been coding .NET for a while, someone has shown you Reflector, Lutz Roeder's .NET Object Browser and you have basked in its glory.

Surprisingly (to me at least) not everyone knows about Reflector's plugin model. There is a vibrant and active community of plugin writers out there, and you won't realize the full power of Reflector until you download some of these are start messing around. Seriously, if you thought that Reflector was useful today, just wait until you've tried some of these add-ins.

PowerShell Language Add-In

The one I've been messing with for the last few weeks is the PowerShell Language Add-in. Reflector can "decompile" (not the correct word) the IL within an assembly and show you the "intent" of that IL in any number of languages like C#, VB, Delphi, etc. Daniel "kzu" Cazzulino has created a PowerShell Language Add-in that, for the most part, shows you what the code would look like in PowerShell.

Now of course, it's important to note a few things. PowerShell is not (yet) a language that you can use to author .NET assemblies with. It is, however, an incredibly powerful scripting and automation environment. Sometimes the Powershell language (it is a language, by the way, with a formal grammar - here's a link (PDF)) can be a little confusing to learn, so the PowerShell Language Add-in is a really cool way to learn more about PowerShell within an environment you're already comfortable in.

Reflector Add-Ins

Here's a reformatted snapshot of what's currently available.

CodeMetrics: Analyses .NET assemblies and shows design quality metrics. Download	Review: Allows editing and managing annotations during code reviews. Download	Diff: This add-in shows differences between two versions of the same assembly. Download
FileDisassembler: This add-in can be used to dump the disassembler output to files for any Reflector supported language.	SQL2005Browser: This add-in allows to browse .NET assemblies stored in SQL Server 2005 databases.	FileGenerator: This add-in can be used to dump the disassembler output to files for any Reflector supported language.
Deblector: This add-in allows to debug processes from within Reflector.	Doubler: A code generator for unit tests, stubs and wrappers.	Graph: This add-in draws assembly dependency graphs and IL graphs. Please read the install instructions here.
DependencyStructureMatrix: Allows you to create and browser dependency structure matrices.	CodeSearch: This add-in allows searching for strings and regular expressions in disassembled code. Download	SequenceViz: This add-in draws sequence diagrams.
PowerShellLanguage: Renders output as Windows PowerShell script.	DelphiLanguage: The Delphi view that is used inside .NET Reflector provided as a language add-in.	CppCliLanguage: This add-in extends Reflector with a C++/CLI language rendering module.
Hawkeye: A tool that allows you to debug the UI tree of Windows Forms applications.	ClassView: Shows class definitions as plain text with color coding.	CodeModelViewer: This add-in shows the underlying code model objects for selected items.
Diff: This add-in shows differences between two versions of the same assembly. Download	ComLoader: Lists COM components for browsing and converts them into managed interop assemblies. Download	TestDriven.net: This Visual Studio add-in can navigate to any code element inside Reflector with a single click.
BizTalkDisassembler: Allows you to list all BizTalk artifacts contained in an assembly and extract them. Download	ComLoader: Lists COM components for browsing and converts them into managed interop assemblies. Download	AutoDiagrammer: This add-in draws class diagrams.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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Last week during lunch one day, Carl and  I recorded an episode of "DotNetRocks TV." This is  Episode 66 of DNRTV. 

We started with the idea that we'd do a show on debugging ASP.NET, but once we got into System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine, I realized that I first needed to cover the relationship between Diagnostics.Trace and Page.Trace, as well as the relationships between debug statements and trace statements inside and outside of ASP.NET. The whole show was spontaneous, no script, no plan, but it turned out pretty darn good for a single take, if I may say so.

Be aware if you download the ZIP that it's about 200megs. The show is in two parts, so there's an advertisement in the middle of the show...after that advert, Part 2 will automatically start. I encourage you to check it out the ad, first because it's telerik and they sincerely rock, and second because our sponsors pay for the massive bandwidth bills for the direct downloads. 

If you like DNRTV, and want to subscribe to the DNRTV Feed, consider using the RSS Downloader features of µTorrent ("microtorrent").

I hope you enjoy the show.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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My sixty-fourth podcast is up, recorded on the floor at Mix. Google for "Lynda" and you'll find the legendary Lynda.com. Lynda Weinman has had a popular online presence for over 12 years. She created the original Web-Safe Color palette (remember when that mattered?) and now she sells nearly 20,000 training videos online via subscription. Silverlight is likely next. I chat with Lynda after we had lunch with Ray Ozzie and some other bloggers. Lynda created the FlashForward Conference, the largest Flash Conference out there - this year it's in Boston in September. As a geek aside, she also worked on the CGI for Return of the Jedi. I hope you enjoy this episode.

ACTION: Please vote for us on Podcast Alley! Digg us at Digg Podcasts!

Links from the Show

 Lynda.com
 Lynda.com Podcasts

Subscribe:

Do also remember the complete archives are always up and they have PDF Transcripts, a little known feature that show up a few weeks after each show.

Telerik is our sponsor for this show.

Telerik is a new sponsor. Check out their UI Suite of controls for ASP.NET. It's very hardcore stuff. One of the things I appreciate about Telerik is their commitment to completeness. For example, they have a page about their Right-to-Left support while some vendors have zero support, or don't bother testing. They also are committed to XHTML compliance and publish their roadmap. It's nice when your controls vendor is very transparent.

As I've said before this show comes to you with the audio expertise and stewardship of Carl Franklin. The name comes from Travis Illig, but the goal of the show is simple. Avoid wasting the listener's time. (and make the commute less boring)

• The basic MP3 feed is here, and the iPod friendly one is here. There's a number of other ways you can get it (streaming, straight download, etc) that are all up on the site just below the fold. I use iTunes, myself, to listen to most podcasts, but I also use FeedDemon and it's built in support.
  • Some other clients are Doppler (also suppose Windows CE), FireAnt, Nimiq, and PrimeTime Podcast.
• Note that for now, because of bandwidth constraints, the feeds always have just the current show. If you want to get an old show (and because many Podcasting Clients aren't smart enough to not download the file more than once) you can always find them at http://www.hanselminutes.com.
• I have, and will, also include the enclosures to this feed you're reading, so if you're already subscribed to ComputerZen and you're not interested in cluttering your life with another feed, you have the choice to get the 'cast as well.
• If there's a topic you'd like to hear, perhaps one that is better spoken than presented on a blog, or a great tool you can't live without, contact me and I'll get it in the queue!

Enjoy. Who knows what'll happen in the next show?

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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There's a lot of Silverlight in the air right now. I haven't seen the 'net abuzz like this since FutureSplash Animator. ;)

I've been collecting links to samples out there. Since Silverlight is all text (XAML, JS, etc) there's a whole world of copy/pasting out there just waiting for us (developers) to create Green and Purple blinking abominations like we did with Visual Basic 3.

I'm enjoying XAML, but I'm not at the point where I'll do it all in a text editor like Chris Sells or all in black and white like Charles Petzold, so I'll stick with using Expression to draw my XAML for now. I've also I haven't gotten my brain around the object model yet...I can't remember who said it, I think it was Bret, but they said it, and they are awesome:

"Drawing with code is like painting over the phone.

Here's links to some of the choicest samples that I've been viciously copy/pasting from after Getting Started and viewing the screencasts and the Silverlight Comparison Chart from Alexander Strauss:

• Lutz's Silverlight 
  • Monotone - Reminds me of the demo scene on C64
  • Digger - really a Boulderdash game clone
  • Inplay - MP3 player. Listen to Hanselminutes if you like.
• DLR/Dynamic Silverlight Samples
  • There's a pile here, make sure you get the DLRConsole. That's a version of the demo John Lam did. You can run the DLRConsole in your browser here. It lets you code in JavaScript or Python, all CLR-compiled and in the browser. Requires Silverlight Alpha 1.1.
• Silverlight Gallery
  • Beta 1.0 Samples - SilverlightPad is a must see, as is PageTurn
  • Alpha 1.1 Samples (my preference) 
    • Silverlight Airline Demo
    • Socializer
    • Silverlight Chess
    • Silverlight Clock
    • Scribbler - great for the kids
• Sam Ruby's Silverlight Workbench 
  • This side-by-side demonstration will likely only work in FireFox with Silverlight for now, and Sam talks about why. He's created a client-side SVG to XAML Converter. It's a start, and clearly a harbinger of things to come.
  • Inline SVG in IE - This demo shows how an island of SVG in an existing document can be translated info Silverlight, allowing us to potentially use Silverlight as a proxy-SVG plugin, enabling inline SVG without Adobe's no-longer-supported Plugin. His javascript shows the SVG on Firefox, and Silverlight on IE and he says "Same source works on MSIE 7.0/with Silverlight on WinXP, Firefox 2.0.0.3 on Ubuntu, and Opera 9.20 also on Ubuntu"
• The Fantasy Baseball demo and source from the Mix Keynote

I'm sure the coming months are going to bring lots of good samples. I also want to dig into OpenLaszlo, JavaFX, and Apollo, as well as Flex. Does anyone have contact info for Ted on Flex? I'd like to do a show on Flex for Hanselminutes.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

About   Newsletter

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