Watch them keys!

By Henning Eiben in Software 1 Comment

So I tried to use this neat feature of VMWare to export a running virtual-machine via VNC to a remote desktop. Works great, especially if your virtual-machine (for whatever reason) is not connected to the network, and thus you cannot use remote-desktop or something similar.

But since I’m a german-keyboard-layout user, I wanted to take advantage of my keyboard-layout (hell, I just wanted to use ;!!). But I had to figure out, that this doesn’t seem to work. So first I blamed UltraVNC and so I switch to some ancient version of the good old AT&T VNC 🙂 but nothing changed.

But after some time I got to it … you need to tweak the *.vmx file of your virtual-machine. This is some setting, that is not available through the GUI … just add:

RemoteDisplay.vnc.keyMap = "<xx>"

where can be any language-code whose keyboard-layout it available in C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\VMware\vnckeymap.

MSBuild vs. NAnt

By Henning Eiben in .Net, Programming 0 Comment

OK, this is probably the 1.000 blog post concering whether to choose MSBuild vs. NAnt.

I had quite a though time fighting my build-environment with MSBuild, after starting out with NAnt (even before MSBee was available). But not I got a couple of things worked out: I can build and do some sort of xcopy-deploymend, I can run NUnit and NCover (even though I had different results from running the gui-runner and the automated nunit-target from my MSBuid-script ?!). But adding more features to this build-process seems be a much bigger burden, that doing the same with NAnt.

So I figured: I will use NAnt for the overall build-process and I will only consider MSBuild for build my solution. I’ll see how this side-by-side usage will work out.

MBunit on Steroids?

By Henning Eiben in .Net, Programming 0 Comment

Well, according to Scott Hanselmann MbUnit is supposed to be Unit Testing on Crack – I would prefer it to be on steroids (as I consider that to be more political correct, because I wouldn’t want to have a drug addict on my team :)) ). But anyway!

So I checked out MbUnit, and so far I think it has quite some neat features. After working for some years with NUnit I long for something new, which satisfies more complex requirements for unit-testing. Event though there are a couple of extensions to NUnit to enabled row-based testing, I consider MbUnit as an alternativ.

I will most definitely give it a try in one of my next projects.

Accessing TFS thru TortoiseSVN

By Henning Eiben in Programming, Software 0 Comment

Somehow I kinda got used to the nice integration of TortoiseSVN into Windows Explorer, and I wouldn’t want to miss that. But since a lot of projects have been moved to codeplex and codeplex uses Team Foundation Server (TFS) instead of Subversion (SVN) for source-control there is some need to be able to access those repositories without much fuzz.

OK, so I tried the SVNBridge, which was developed by Ayende (cool job!!). This is very nice, you get a little kind of proxy, which allows you to use TortoiseSVN to access reporitories hosted on TFS 🙂

Re-deployment of services

By Henning Eiben in .Net, Programming 0 Comment

So I had to write a windows-service, and as usual development-exercise I followed a rather agile development-pattern. So I coded something, installed it and figured that I was missing out on something. OK, no prob. Just do some more coding, uninstall the existing service and install the new version of the service. For that matter I just did an:

%windir%\microsoft.net\framework\v2.0.50727\installutil /u ServiceHost.exe
%windir%\microsoft.net\framework\v2.0.50727\installutil ServiceHost.exe

But after executing these two actions in a nice and handy batch-file I was prompted with an error, that the new service could not be installed! What a rip-off! So I needed to restart Windows in order to re-install my new version of my service.

After some testing I figured, that I need to pause a seconds or so between un-installing and re-installing a service. After modifying my batch to this, everything worked out as expected:

%windir%\microsoft.net\framework\v2.0.50727\installutil /u ServiceHost.exe
pause
%windir%\microsoft.net\framework\v2.0.50727\installutil ServiceHost.exe

Pimpin' the prompt

By Henning Eiben in Software 0 Comment

OK, here comes another part of pimp my whatever! Today’s feature is your always underestimated console prompt.

OK, after doing some pimping on your console, you might want to do more, to distinguish from the rest of us. Why not change the look of your prompt. How about:

set prompt=[%computername%] $d$s$t$_$p$_$_$+$g

which will give you:

[NPC008] 10.03.2008 17:54:40,76
C:\WINDOWS
>

Well, that’s neat 🙂 Or try something different:

set prompt=$m$_$p$g

which will yield in:

\\server\share
V:\>