Code Digger

Microsoft has announced the release of Code Digger. It is an extension to Visual Studio 2012. Code Digger analyzes your code and determines an interesting set of inputs which stimulates the paths in your code. The set of inputs is presented in a table that also shows the outputs from your code.

You need to have at least the Professional version of the Visual Studio. You can find the tool in the Visual Studio Gallery. It relies on the PEX engine to do its work. That's because it was created by the PEX team, which is essentially two dudes from Microsoft Research.

There are some other limitations. Your code must be .NET. And it only works on portable class libraries. When you set up your Visual Studio project, choose portable class library as the type. That will enable you to use Code Digger.

Office 365

The most interesting thing I have heard out of Redmond is the new licensing model for Microsoft Office. The latest version is called Office 365. This is a yearly subscription model. Looks like you download the software over the Internet. You get charged a yearly fee to get access to the latest version of the Office suite.

The real kicker is the pricing, especially when compared to the old style product. The cost structure almost forces you to go the subscription way. The retail shrink wrapped one-time product purchase is becoming a bad value compared to the subscription costs. Ouch.

I might just sit this one out. My current version of Office is good enough. However the low cost subscription offer is a hard one to pass up. I think this is the Microsoft plan.

Visual Studio 2012

I finally got around to getting a new laptop at work. The bad news is that I need to reinstall all my software. In a pinch, I added Notepad++ to bang out some JavaScript code. However I really wanted to get back to using Visual Studio for development. So I found my Visual Studio 2012 install media and got to work.

Previously I had Visual Studio 2010 installed on my work laptop. However I think I got Visual Studio 2012 but never installed it. Now was a good time to make the upgrade. It took a while for the installation to complete. But it finally was done. When I launched Visual Studio, I was taken aback by the menus being all caps. I finally saw what the hubbub was from all the other developers who were early adopters.

The all caps menus look a bit amateurish. This isn't the 1980's with some VT-100 style display. So why make the menus look that way? I would hope it was not for visibility purposes. If I need things to look bigger, I can get a massive monitor and turn down the resolution.

Hopefully Microsoft will realize the mistake and return back to normal menus next time around. When will that be? Perhaps Visual Studio 2013. So far I have not noticed anything else awry with Visual Studio. Then again, I am only using it as a text editor for JavaScript right now. I might be doing some heavy C++ application lifting in the early months of 2013. So we shall see.

Visual Studio Lightswitch

I am starting to hear about a new tool from Microsoft called Visual Studio Lightswitch. At first I had trouble figuring out who the heck this tool was aimed at. Now it seems it is for lightweight developers who want to create a database app. Specifically it seems to work with SQL Server.

Lightswitch apps are built on Silverlight. You can extend them using Visual Basic or C#. If you know technologies such as WCF or Entity Framework, then you are going to be at home with Lightswitch. Personally I am a C++ developer. I do not currently do Silverlight. So this one does not seem to be for me.

Corrupt Visual Studio

I needed to quickly roll out a prototype app for my new idea. So I coded up the app using my Visual Studio 2005 Professional. Something weird happened. The linker would bomb every other time I ran it.

After a while, it did not happen every single other time. However it aborted on the average once every two runs. This was very strange. I needed a version of Visual Studio with Installshield anyway. To solve this, I decided to install Visual Studio 2010 Professional. It looks like the linker problem has gone away.

What the heck was that all about? I don't know. If it happpens again, I will have to consult Microsoft support.

Debugging

If you app does not handle an exception, a dump file will be generated. This gets done automatically by Windows Error Reporting. You are going to want some custom tools to work with this dump file.

You should start with Debugging Tools for Windows. This is a part of the Windows SDK. It is also part in parcel of the Windows Driver Kit, which you use compile additions to the tools.

Once you get into the WDK, the world is at your fingertips. I want to get to creating my own extension to the WDK. Unfortunately we have app crashes too frequently on our system. Time to investigate them and figure out what we need to do to eliminate them.

Nokia Partnership

Nokia has announced a strategic partnership with Microsoft. Nokia will use Windows Phone 7 for its smart phones. It will also use Bing for search on its phones.

Nokia has a 31% market share in the mobile phone market. They previously partnered with Intel to produce the MeeGo open source mobile operating system.

The Windows Mobile operating system is being phased out. It is being replaced by Windows Phone 7. This o/s targets the consumer market. Other phone manufacturers using Windows Phone 7 include Samsung, LG, and Ericsson.