John Robbins

After a couple of requests, I added WiX 4.0 support to my Paraffin project, the file harvester, which makes maintaining installer projects a lot easier. As part of this update, I moved the code to Visual Studio 2017 and moved to .NET...

We have a new version of Visual Studio coming soon so I did the work to update my WintellectPowerShell module to support it. And, what a huge adventure that turned out to be! I will discuss why its support for...

Having purchased a 15 inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar recently, I’ve been having a good time seeing how that Touch Bar can be used. With applications that know about the Touch Bar, it is an interesting UI approach. But...

A while ago I whipped up a small utility to search for filenames at the command line. I noticed recently that it did not handle long filenames over 260 (MAX_PATH) characters. Having a few spare minutes I updated FastFileFinder to...

Getting and installing modules is easier than ever with the PowerShell Gallery and PowerShellGet. Instead of downloading and extracting files into your PowerShell modules directory, a simple call to Install-Module takes care of everything for you. Today I’ve published my...

On my production machine, my Apple MacBook Pro, I did an in place upgrade from Windows 8.1 to Windows 10. I ran into a couple of bumps and got them figured out so I thought I’d post this for others...

How many clicks has this dialog eaten out of your life? The idea for the warning is good because, you know, SECURITY. However, if you’re developing web apps or anything running in IIS, this gets old by the thousandth time...

When debugging a nasty problem in your code, one of the most helpful things you can get is a minidump. With that picture of what your app was doing at the time of the crash, hang, or when the memory...

Now that Visual Studio 2015 RC is fresh off the build machines and available for everyone, I’ve updated my Wintellect.Analyzers project (http://johnr.us/1bEO4h8) with full RC support. Go forth and add them to your project so you can get the benefit...

My deep abiding love of Roslyn continues! I just published a new video Writing Roslyn Analyzers and Code Fixes up at WintellectNOW: https://www.wintellectnow.com/Videos/Watch?videoId=writing-roslyn-analyzers-and-code-fixes. My goal was to take you from zero knowledge of Roslyn to writing a real world analyzer...

The other day my co-worker Jeffrey Richter and I were discussing my latest infatuation, Roslyn analyzers. As we bounced around a few ideas one came to the forefront; every catch block should throw. This is not a hard and fast...

Mark your calendars for May 14-15, 2015 for the free 2015 Microsoft MVP Virtual Conference. This is a Microsoft sponsored conference where Microsoft Valuable Professionals (MVPs) will be presenting five different tracks for world wide consumption: IT Pro, Developer, Consumer,...

Over the last few months I have been having a wonderful time developing Roslyn analyzers and code fixes. You can find all the Wintellect.Analyzers code at Wintellect’s GitHub page. If you would like to include these analyzers in your own...

I happened to be working on a C# Roslyn code analyzer and being cognizant that not all the world speaks English, I went through the five minutes of work to internationalize the analyzer DLL. Add the .RESX file and you’re...

As I was building up a moderately complicated pipeline in PowerShell, I was having some trouble and really wished there was a way to single step the pipeline so I could see the state of each item as it was...

When I first saw the Roslyn compiler, I was thrilled! For once the compiler was not going to be a black hole where source code comes in and on the other side of the worm hole a binary comes out....

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Shawn Wildermuth has been doing the Hello World Podcast for a while and it’s very interesting to hear about how great developers got started and what they’ve learned along the way. For the June 2nd edition, Shawn interviewed me! You...

In this corner we have a Microsoft Surface Pro that needs to have a full client restore. In that corner we have Microsoft’s own Windows Server 2012 Essentials that contains said full client backup. Let’s get ready to rumble! ™...

Eight days ago I went through the five Kübler-Ross stages of grief in about 490 milliseconds as I watched my Surface Pro fall out of my backpack and kiss the concrete directly on the upper right hand corner. I didn’t...

One of my favorite tricks is to use Visual Studio breakpoints to call a method to force state changes when testing code. There’s just some times where calling a method at a breakpoint is the fastest way to create a...

While we are getting some nice tools from Microsoft for analyzing our memory, there’s still a lot of gaps where you have to resort to WinDBG and SOS. A perfect example that I’ve run into is looking at variables/types that...

Now that Devscovery is over, it's time to get back to answering questions about one of my favorite subjects: PDB files! Yes, I lead an extremely exciting life if PDB files set my heart racing. Maybe they have a pill...

In my ongoing discussion of PDB files and debugging, Sa Li had a great question: Should the final release native program also generate the pdb files before being published? If switching on the pdb in link setting, what kind of...

After a detour into Historical Debugging, it’s time to come back to return to answering questions about PDB files. Here’s a question from Justin: Thanks for the great post once again. I was looking forward to your debugging virtual training,...

As I've discussed, PDB files are wondrous bundles of binary joy. However, loading missing PDB files can quickly become an angst-ridden teenager as you wait what seems like forever on a network timeout for missing symbols. This is especially apparent...

Thanks for visiting one of the most popular pieces I’ve ever written! Based on questions I’ve written a few follow up articles you might find useful to extend your PDB knowledge after reading this one. Keeping Specific PDB Files from...

Recently I was working on a performance bug for a client where our hypothesis was that there was too much file I/O going on in the process, which was causing unnecessary page faults. As this application is a kiosk application...

A few years ago Mark Russinovich and I put together a feature in SysInternal’s Process Monitor where you can add tracing statements to the log. (Here’s the original post.) The idea was that by seeing your tracing in line with...

This week I’m working behind the “Great Firewall” in China and Twitter is blocked by the Chinese government, but my blog is not. I would have tweeted this but instead dear reader, you get the complete back story along with...

The Productivity Power Tools extension is one of those must haves in Visual Studio, especially if you are showing Visual Studio as a presenter. Typing PresentOn in the Quick Launch (CTRL+Q) box makes the IDE font, menu items, and dialog...

Wintellect’s most important client, my wife, comes to me and says that her Outlook desktop application is all messed up. It hasn’t connected and downloaded emails in over five hours. She’s rebooted the computer and done basic Outlook trouble shooting...

Over the years I’ve been posting on the blog here at Wintellect a set of MSBuild tasks that make it easy to get the TFS Build number during a build and use it as your binary version string. You can...

Don’t you just love the following error message when trying to debug a minidump with SOS and WinDBG? The version of SOS does not match the version of CLR you are debugging.  Please load the matching version of SOS for...

Numerous times in the last month I’ve been working with different teams and when I whip out my PowerShell window and start doing all the magic, especially with Visual Studio command line tools, the young kids go crazy. The mix...

On May 9th, I’ll be speaking at the South Sound .NET User Group in Olympia, WA on all about IntelliTrace. See location and signup info here. IntelliTrace is the first real Windows debugging technology since the hair band days of...

When sampling profiling on Windows 8 or Server 2012, nothing looks different in Visual Studio 2012, but the entire insides of the profiling collector is completely changed. With the profiler now based on Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) everything is...

Turns out there’s a TrackPad Settings application! Huge thanks to Sumit Maitra for mentioning its existence on my last blog post. There was nothing in the documentation or on Microsoft’s web site that this application existed, which is a huge...

Read the follow up! There's a fix: Unicorns and Puppies Return It sure seems that a lot of you want to toss out your laptops given how many emails and messages I got this asking how Visual Studio runs on...

Let’s just cut to the chase: I love it! I would have to call it the best general laptop I’ve had. With touch, the pen, and running Visual Studio in a two pound package, there’s a whole lot to like...

Working on a giant codebase recently, I needed to check if all C# projects had Code Analysis turned on for all configurations. Given there were easily 30 to 40 different .CSPROJ files I was so not looking forward to manually...

For some reason, I always seem to be looking for file and directory names. Since desktop search is a GUI and I'm a command line kind of guy, I got tired of waiting on PowerShell to slowly grind through the...

Edit Feb 1, 2013: Install the Acer 2..04 Master Installer update release on Jan 30, 2013 and the "limited connect from wake" issue has been fixed. Having been living with the W510 hard for the last month, I thought I’d...

A couple of years ago I was messing around and decided when doing a presentation on PowerShell for Developers only losers would use PowerPoint, but I needed to show bullet points and URLs. Thus, Start-PowerShellPoint was born! The first rule...

I wanted to follow up on my initial review of the W510 after some longer real world usage. And heavy usage it is! I’m still hugely enamored with Outlook 2013 on a tablet so found myself grabbing it for that...

Visual Studio 2012 finally gave us backwards project compatibility so you can slide between VS 2010 and VS 2012 as you needed. It’s a great feature and one we’ve sorely needed for a long time. When I upgraded my projects...

Living in Seattle has its benefits. It’s an amazing city as we’re on the ocean and only an hour from world class skiing in the mountains. We can now even smoke all the marijuana we want except it has to...

Things have slowed down enough I was able to get around to fixing a small bug in Paraffin where I was accidentally including .ParaffinMold files in the .WXS output. Also, as I finally caught up with the cool kids and...

Last week the Microsoft Central District asked me to come down and do a road show through Texas and Arkansas. What a road show it was; seven flights, six different hotels, and 20+ hours driving between places in six days....

Looks like I forgot to post the updated version of my TFS Build Number Task for VS/TFS 2012. Let me rectify that by pointing you to the updated version here: https://training.atmosera.com/cs/files/folders/21032/download.aspx. If you’re wondering what this is about, here’s the...

Recently I had to compare a bunch of directory pairs and while PowerShell offers the Compare-Object, I needed something more that would not only look at filenames but compare binary files as well. Figuring some nice person on the Internet...

The TFS 2012 Power Tool installation only installs the TFS PowerShell Snap-In for the 32-bit flavor of PowerShell on an x64 machine. With nearly all developers running x64 machines, we miss the ability to script TFS access in the ultimate...

While looking why I was running running short on disk space, I noticed that my IntelliTrace file directory was very large. The default option for debugging with IntelliTrace is to delete the .iTrace file as soon as you stop debugging....

Conservation is always good so I’m going to recycle some keystrokes. Today I got an email where a company had two symbol servers set up. One was no longer used but held symbols for previously released projects. Since PDB files...

We’ve been kind of loose at Wintellect on how we deal with our open source projects. Many are published like mine on a blog or various open source hosting sites. After discussing it internally, we are now starting to push...

When I first heard that macros were being dropped from Dev 11 I was gobsmacked. (I just love that world!) While the macro story up to Visual Studio 2010 wasn’t great because we couldn’t write macros in our .NET language...

We are growing like crazy at Wintellect and want you to work for us! We’d prefer full time employment, but would be happy to also work with some of you excellent independent contractors. At this time we need candidates to...

With Dev 11 Beta now in our hot little hands, I needed to update my symbol server and source server PowerShell scripts that automate setting up a developer machine. I’ve packaged up all the scripts previously published on this blog...

One of these days Microsoft will release a version of .NET where we don’t have to worry about memory. HA! Who am I kidding!? All you worry about in a .NET application is the memory. Naturally, I personally never want...

Dev 11 has a diff and merge view that is simply outstanding and using it to compare changes before checkin is just dreamy. I ran into a situation where I wanted to diff the output of two files and thought...

Realizing I hadn’t updated my build server that ran against TFS Preview to the Beta Dev 11 TFS, I upgraded the machine and ran into a problem. The first queued build stuck and could not be canceled or deleted from...

So today is the day everyone gets to see if that monochrome/metro UI look for Visual Studio Dev 11 works. Given the huge number of “constructive criticism” comments  that everyone gave on the first look it will be very interesting...

So I guess February 29th ought to be quite interesting with Windows 8 Consumer Preview and VS 11 being released. An even more important date is Monday February 27th as that’s when we are holding a Wintellect Tweetup where we...

Ed Blankenship has a brilliant idea to make symbol servers even easier to use. He wants TFS itself to serve up the symbols instead of requiring you to create the file share and fight with the network admins to get...

There’s a lot of UI research going on focused around better debugging. Debugger Canvas is some that you can use today and the version 1.1 was just released. The speed increased in 1.1 are great and make Debugger Canvas much...

Business is good and we need YOU! Wintellect is currently seeking senior level technical development resources for both contract and permanent employment for our current client projects. If you want the challenge of keeping up with co-workers like Jeffrey Richter,...

Paraffin 3.6 can be downloaded here: https://training.atmosera.com/CS/files/folders/18310/download.aspx Dan Gough had an excellent feature request to have Paraffin copy over any manually added namespaces to the .WXS file like the following. Previously, Paraffin ignored them, but no more. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>...

The other day I was asked which extensions for Visual Studio I use so in an effort to save keystrokes, I thought I’d list them here so I can refer people to this list. There’s no way this is a...

Edit: Make sure to read the comments from Shay Levy and Richard on clarifying my mistaken assumptions about how things work in PowerShell. Thanks to Richard & Shay for the clarifications! As I’m a command line kind of guy, I...

So you have an awesome minidump your IT guys grabbed with ProcDump. You’ve followed all the rules and have a Symbol Server and Source Server all set up. You open that dump with Visual Studio and BOOM, none of your...

In the development world, there’s a lot of things that bump, distract, and annoy you through the day. Those get a lot of attention in blogs to help others work around those issues and to document the pain. What does...

Sometimes it’s easy to see why your .NET server application is using so much memory, but other times it makes no sense at all. I was at Microsoft earlier this week and someone who’d taken my debugging class stopped me...

So I have been installing new builds of Windows since NT 3.1 Beta 1 so I can’t help myself! After downloading Windows 8 Developer Preview I  of course had to give it a go on my ASUS EP121. It’s a...

On a mailing list I’m on Ed Blankenship pointed out that VS updates are now coming through Windows Update. Finally! Hopefully Microsoft will keep pushing these updates for all products they ship because it’s something of a pain to keep...

The other day I wrote about how to incorporate build numbers into your .CSPROJ and .VCXPROJ files. In doing some more testing I found in some edge cases where the way I was getting the current build number by including...

A while ago, I showed using MSBuild 4.0 to create build version files with the TFS build number so that build number could be included in your binaries. While you can use Jim Lamb's excellent custom workflow activity, I liked...

Recently I bought a smoking fast external SSD enclosures from Other World Computing. My plan was to use the FireWire 800 connection to the drive so I can get the best portable speed possible. Alas, on all my machines as...

Everything in .NET revolves around memory. As in who in the heck is holding on to all my objects so memory usage just keeps going up and up and up. In conjunction with the Linked In .NET Users Group, on...

Deep down inside every developer really wants to create developer tools. Let’s be honest, how many of you are really excited to the tips of your toes about that Line of Business application you’re working on? It pays the bills...

While you should always have your PDB files in symbol servers, there are times when you’re doing private (aka local) builds and moving those builds around hither and yon in a test environment where you can accidentally forget to copy...

Hey, I heard about this really interesting social media thing called Twitter. It lets you type quick posts in 140 characters to let people know what’s going on. It looks really interesting. Maybe you should check it out. OK, so...

Debugger UI’s haven’t changed much at all since I started doing Windows development way back in 1990. You have a call stack, memory, and locals windows that are using code older than many of you looking at them. I really...

How did we ever use Windows before the taskbar Aero peek? Rolling your mouse across the taskbar and having the previews is an amazing productivity enhancement. On one of my machines aero peek was partially broken. Using ALT+TAB showed aero...

If all you need to do is install your web application into Default Web Site, life is easy. Especially since Windows Installer XML (WiX) has all that support right in the box. Where things get nasty is if you need...

The estimable Ed Blankenship posted a must read article for everyone using TFS 2010: Source Server and Symbol Server Support in TFS 2010. Bookmark that article because it’s the one stop shop for all the best practices for symbol server,...

Looking over the offerings at CES 2011, the ASUS Eee Slate EP121 caught my eye as I had been looking for a replacement slate computer since my beloved Motion M1400 found a new home with my niece. I ordered one...

In the last week or so, there’s been a number of interesting emails pass through my inbox. So interesting in fact, I wanted to make sure to share them. Aren’t those Code Metrics for .NET in Visual Studio great? I...

As I always have Process Explorer running in tray area, I noticed that with my computer doing nothing, the CPU icon was showing constant 10%-12% CPU utilization. It was one of the many SRVHOST.EXE processes, and running the RPC Endpoint...

Sometimes the internet is totally awesome and other times it’s a complete morass of “how come I can’t find anything?” Recently, I needed to build a quick installer that did nothing more than install new virtual directory under the ubiquitous...

One of my most used utilities, Window Clippings, has a brand new version! Kenny Kerr has added all sorts of wonderful screen capture goodness to Windows Clippings 3 that allows you to take that perfect snapshot of what’s on your...

A little short of three years ago, I wrote a blog entry, "Code Signing – It's Cheaper and Easier than you Thought." In there I talked about buying my three year certificate from TUCOW's author web site (who's a reseller...

Has it really been ten years since Jeff Prosise, Jeffrey Richter, Lewis Frazer, and I started Wintellect? No way! It really is true that when you're having fun, time flies. When we started we had no idea we'd survive the...

Yes, yes, oh god, yes! All "When Harry Met Sally" references aside, one of the most important performance statements you will ever read in your development life is expressed below from Rico Mariani. We see this anti pattern constantly in...

Don't you love it when your application works on one machine, but not the other? We were running into this exact issue with a client and needed to see what was different between the operating systems on two machines. Thinking...

Do you want all that IntelliTrace goodness as well as all the OS/Tools that MSDN offers? For free? Of course you do! Head over to Wintellect's Marketing Director Bethany Vananda's blog (https://training.atmosera.com/CS/blogs/bvananda/archive/2010/09/09/devscovery-sponsor-thank-you-wintellect-contest-join-the-fun-win-prizes.aspx) for all the details. Best of luck to...

Slowly but surely I'm getting through the list of feature requests everyone's been asking for. This release of Paraffin brings support for the trick outline by Vagmi Mudumbai (http://geekswithblogs.net/Vagmi.Mudumbai/archive/2006/06/11/81426.aspx) of allowing minor upgrades (AKA patches) to remove files by setting...

With Paraffin 3.5, I included this document, but thought it would be worth posting as well for those of you that aren't familiar with Paraffin. You can download the lastest release here: https://training.atmosera.com/CS/files/folders/18310/download.aspx Introduction When building WiX-based installers, you quickly...

Every once in a while you run across an undocumented trick that totally and completely makes your day. A great example of that is the ability to debug MSBuild scripts in Visual Studio. Today I ran across another amazingly useful...

See the corrected entry with pictures https://training.atmosera.com/CS/blogs/jrobbins/archive/2010/07/14/a-cool-windbg-sos-hidden-feature.aspx.