In a previous post I wrote about how you could create a VS2005 template. I also told you that there was a problem when using multi-project templates. This can be solved by using the GAT tool to create your template. If you never heard about the Guidance Automation Toolkit (GAT) or the Guidance Automation Extensions, I would like to refer the Guidance Automation community site. You are probably wondering why I’m talking about two products. Let’s make it clear. First you have the Guidance Automation Extensions. This is the runtime and must be installed on every machine that will make use of Guidance Packages. The Guidance Automation Toolkit is only needed on the machines of the architects or lead-developers or the developers who will create the Guidance Packages. In this post I will provide you a solution for the problem with the multi-project templates

For a project I'm currently working on, we need a service that send on regular base a signal to a certain system, this service can't be hosted in IIS and we need to use a windows service because the Windows Service can continuously send that signal. This service uses an httplistener to receive the soap messages from clients and parses the incoming SOAP to get the data. This simulates the IIS so soap calls can be send through HTTP, clients are not aware of the fact that they are not talking to IIS. This concept allows keeping sending the heartbeats while processing the soaprequest.

In this chapter, we will show you how you can generate your NAnt build scripts. First we do it the manual way, but at the end you will see that we have a script, which automaticly creates our master.build scripts for all the projects we have defined in our script generator. There will be a follow up for this article in the next chapter to discuss the a few build scripts which are called from within this script.

In this chapter we will show you how we can add a project to our cruisecontrol.Net configuration file, so it will build our project. NAnt uses master.build files for building a project. In this chapter we show you also how this build file can be made.

It's been a while, but finally I had some time for a new post.

In my post "Vista #7: Software part 4", I mentioned the problem I had with installing SP1 for VS 2005.  A few weeks later, the SP1 came with the windows update and installs correctly.  After the installation I also installed the SP1 Patch for Vista.

Finally my VS2005 is up and running.  But when starting VS2005, I always got following message

When pressing the continue, VS 2005 starts up.  After a few quick checks it seems that VS2005 runs normally without any problem.  Trying to disable this warning, I set off the UAC, change the startup of VS2005 with admin rights, but nothing seems to help. 

My guess is that it's just a warning to be sure that you have enough rights for using VS2005.

While I was learning WPF I saw that there was a spelling check possibility added to the textbox and richttextbox. It works nicely, the only thing that I didn't found out then was how to change the language library so that you could use the spelling check for the Dutch language instead of the English (and default) one.

Finally I have more info about it:

First of all at this moment only the English, French and German language library's are available (I quote that this was at the end of February 2007).

When having a textbox, the language of the spellchecker depends on the language of the control, while for the richtextbox this depends on the typed text.

For the textbox you could change your language using this statement: x:lang="en-us" or x:lang="fr-fr".

You can find more info here: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms788718.aspx

Yesterday I also saw a blog article by Gill Cleeren, where he stated that the spell check comes from the Office dictionary. Have to look at it.

Finally the next part of my Buildserver article.  This time about the the project structure we are using.

First of all, let's see our project structure in Sourcesafe :

We can locate following folders:

• Sources : Still in the project folder
• BinIntern : The project compiled assemblies
• BinExtern : external assemblies
• Release : The officially deployed assemblies
• Buildscripts: All the Cruisecontrol.net, Nant (MsBuild) scripts are located here. This folder has also a subfolder for each Visual Studio Project. In here you can find the master.build script for each project specifically.
• Tools: All the correct versions of the tools (= the versions which are used in the scripts and sources).
• Server and WebDashboard: Contains the configuration of CruiseControl.net like config files, projects, reports, style sheets…

This is it for this part.  Be sure to stayed tuned for the next part, as we will start with our first NAnt scripts.

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Overview Buildserver chapters on my blog :

Chapter 1 : Introduction
Chapter 2 : CruiseControl.Net
Chapter 3 : Projects
Chapter 4 : Project Structure
Chapter 5 : NAnt and all our buildscripts

A short overview of my two days at Dev & IT Pro Days 2007 in Belgium. The sessions I'v followed and more.

If you have a Creative Soundblaster X-Fi, you will be happy to know that they have released a new version (2.13.0012) of their drivers for Vista.  Finally gone out of beta.  Download the driver here.

I just have installed them and I must say the sound is better now.