Scott Hanselman

UPDATE: The MSBuild Everett Environment (MSBEE) has just been announced! Soon this will be a (reasonably) supported scenario and we'll all be able to build both 1.1 and 2.0 versions of .NET code on Visual Studio 2005. Shiny.

I'm definitely digging the information on Jomo Fisher's MSBUILD blog. I've long been critical of MSBUILD calling it a "NAnt wanna-be" (usually in bitterness) because I'm SUCH a NAnt fan. However, while writing the book and working with VS.NET 2005 on the Coding4Fun articles I've grown to respect MSBUILD as an entity in its own right. More and more, I've been consistently impressed with it's flexibility and power.

Here's some gems from Jomo's site:

• Programmatically Converting older Projects to MSBuild - This kicks ass:
  using System;
  using System.Text;
  using Microsoft.Build.Conversion;
  class ConvertProject
  {
       static void Main(string[] args)
       {
            ProjectFileConverter c = new ProjectFileConverter();
            c.OldProjectFile = args[0];
            c.NewProjectFile = args[1];
            c.Convert();
       }
  }
• Using VS.NET to target .NET 1.1 - A great and very visceral example of how the .targets system works. Additional info at Jon Galloway's blog who linked to Armand's blog. I ended up using Armand's "Everett Target" installer and it worked great with RTM. Armand's installer is a roll-up of Jomo's sample.
• Disclaimer: This target doesn't support COM references, Web references and a few other cases. But it sure proves the concept!
• ACTION REQUIRED (That means you blog reader!): Clichten is looking for feedback on this very issue. Should Microsoft offer rich target support for ISVs and vendors to target 1.1 with VS.NET 2005? Damn right they should.
• If you care about this issue, go make your voice heard!

Other MSBUILD loveliness from elsewhere on the 'Net:

• Gustavo Guerra has a .targets file that adds 11 new targets to VS.NET 2005 including Mono. I suspect we're going to see some amazing stuff happening around targets. It'll be interesting to see how far it goes.
• Speculation: Could this flexibility make VS.NET 2005 an Eclipse competitor by enabling non-.NET targets?
• SharpDevelop (an alternate free .NET IDE) ships with two custom MSBuild Tasks for Mono explains Matt Ward. It takes a different tack than Gustavo's .target file. Instead the custom tasks do the actual work of compiling the code and delegating to MCS (the Mono compiler)
• Robert McLaws continues to push the MSBUILD envelope. Robert's MSBuild toolkit may be the engine on top of the engine. He adds a much-needed MSBUILD Configuration option to the Solution Explorer. He says, Watch this space. And I watch.

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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Request for comment: I do Google Adsense and no one has complained. What do you guys think if I inserted small ads in my RSS feeds? Every item? Every 3rd? This is to pay for gadgets to review and bandwidth; I'm not getting rich on this.

What do you think?

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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I helped a friend out a while back and she hooked me up with a black iPod Nano 2G yesterday. I've love being 'paid' with gadgets. I've got an older 3rd-gen iPod 15Gig so I figured it'd be interesting to see how iTunes plays with two iPods on one machine. 

Here's what happened:

• Downloaded the new iTunes 6.01 and installed it on my laptop.
• Plugged in the Nano and was told after some thrashing that "an error occurred while installing your hardware. It may not work."
• iTunes noticed it though and started it's "What's your iPod named" wizard. I set it up as Scott's Nano and told it to "automatically update with Music."
• I've got certainly MORE than 2Gigs of Music so I was interested in the Shuffle-like "figure it out and give me some music" features. Apparently I'm an idiot or these features don't exist.
• After some churning iTunes reported that my iPod didn't have enough room for all my music. Not sure why that wasn't obvious since iTunes knew (via it's icon) that it was a black Nano.
• It offered to make a Playlist with "a selection of music" from my Library. I naively assumed this was the shuffled pile I'd been hoping for.
• It made a 300 meg list of music, mostly stuff I'd listened to often or recently. 300 hundred megs you say? That's weird. No warnings, no log, no logic, nothing.
• Turns out that it assumes you want ALL your podcasts by default. That was 1700 megs for me. I had to manually select that I just wanted "checked" podcasts and had to cull that list.
• I also told it to sync my photos, my calendars and my contacts.
  • Interestingly there is NO error message when you have > 1000 contacts. This is a known limit, but there's no notification. The contacts just don't show up. LAME. The interface is a single checkbox.
  • It syncs EVERYTHING in your calendar for all time, in both directions. This makes the calendar interface on the iPod VERY crowded and almost unusable as I've got 801 appts in Outlook as of today.
  • It automatically assumes that you want music first and photos, contacts and calendars last. So, if you fill it with music, you get no contacts, photos or calendars. You'll only get a warning if the photos can't fit.

I'll I want is to say:

• I want 1.5 gig of music, randomly chosen.
• I want the rest for photos, but I want ALL my contacts along with 6 months of appointments.

I fought with this interface for an hour last night. I don't know what's happening at Apple, and I'm just a caveman, but do I know this:

• iTunes 4 just worked.
• We went from v5 to v5.5 to v6 now v6.01 in the space of a few months.
• Something is seriously wrong in v6 that makes USB connectivity questionable at best.

My conclusion: If you have more music than your iPod can comfortably fit, you're going to fight with the space management aspect continuously.

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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You may notice, when installing VS.NET 2005 that it's a little "greedy" and automatically imports all of your VS.NET 2003 addins. This confuses CodeRush which uses different hooks into 2003 vs. 2005 but can be easily fixed by uninstalling and reinstalling CodeRush. CodeRush will then detect BOTH 2003 and 2005 and work with both.

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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