Author: Scott

Ballet

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This year is the second in a row I’ve gotten to go to a Kennedy Center performance.  Last year, my girlfriend (now fiancée) and I went with another couple to see Porgy & Bess.  This past Thursday, it was the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.  Having never seen a ballet before (or anything called modern dance for that matter), I had no idea what to really expect.  It turned out to be quite a fun time.

Of the four works they performed (all of which were impressive), my favorite parts were the solo “The Evolution of a Secured Feminine”, and other dances within “Revelations” (the company’s signature work) that had no more than a handful of dancers.  I suppose that no one goes to the ballet for the music, but with Duke Ellington music as the backdrop for one of the pieces and gospel for some of the others, I certainly enjoyed that as much as the dancing.

.NET Reflector–No Longer Free, But Still Worth It

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Those of us who registered with red-gate.com after they bought Reflector from its creator, Lutz Roeder, got an e-mail on February 2 saying the next version of Reflector would no longer be free.  It’s the second time in my recent memory that a free and/or open source package for .NET became closed.  The first one was NCover, which was probably the best option out there for determining how much of your codebase was covered by unit tests.  Even at a price with subscription of $658, it may be a more cost-effective option than paying for the Visual Studio sku that includes team testing tools.

By contrast, the entry-level price for .NET Reflector is relatively low ($35).  As a tool, I think it’s valuable enough to the every-day .NET developer to spend their own money for.

Introducing .NET Reflector

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I gave a presentation on .NET Reflector at the January 12 meeting of RockNUG.  I took most of my time demonstrating the product and answering questions, so I had very few slides.  So instead of simply posting them here and calling it a day, this blog post will incorporate some of the Q & A that happened during the presentation.

What Is It?

The title slide in my presentation called .NET Reflector an “x-ray machine for (unobfuscated) .NET assemblies”.  That little phrase actually understates what .NET Reflector can do.  Decompiling .NET assemblies is only one of the three major things it does (and is probably the best-publicized of its capabilities).  This tool also provides an excellent class browser and static analysis capabilities.

Why Is It Helpful?

In addition to giving developers to see code for third-party assemblies when they don’t have access to their source files, it can be quite a useful learning tool for seeing what the compiler generates on-the-fly for the source code we write ourselves.

Demos

One of the first features I demonstrated was the ability of .NET Reflector to decompile an assembly into multiple .NET languages.  C# is the default, but VB.NET, Delphi, Oxygene, MC++, F#, and MSIL are the other target languages available out of the box.  Using the add-in architecture of .NET Reflector, one developer added limited support for decompilation to PowerShell (download the PowerShellLanguage.zip file).

Around this point in the presentation, someone asked if you could cut-and-paste decompiled source into a file.  Not only does it work, but with Denis Bauer’s Reflector FileDissassembler plug-in installed, you can decompile an entire assembly into its constituent source code files (though I suspect that Red Gate Software would prefer that you pay for .NET Reflector Pro to get this capability). 

I was also able to demonstrate the much-overlooked static analysis capabilities of .NET Reflector.  They enable developers to learn what code depends on particular methods, where they’re used, what code exposes them, and where they’re called.  It turns out that there’s a free plug-in which extends this capability even further.  The Dependency Structure Matrix (DSM) plug-in allows developers to generate and manipulate matrices for determining the level of complexity in a software architecture.  Considering that a full-featured tool with DSM capability like NDepend costs hundreds of dollars per seat license, even a fraction of those features from a free .NET Reflector plug-in are well worth the time to learn how to leverage.

More Q & A

When I showed that .NET Reflector pulled in source code comments in its display of disassembled code, one member of the audience pointed out (correctly) that this was only possible because the XML file containing the comments was co-located with the assembly.  When I tested the disassembly capability afterwards without the XML file present, the comments didn’t display.

There was also a question from the audience about how .NET Reflector compared with ILDASM (which ships with the .NET Framework).  The short answer is that ILDASM is far more limited by comparison.  It only decompiles to IL, it lacks the analysis capabilities of .NET Reflector, and most importantly it doesn’t have a plug-in architecture to enable expansion of what it can do.

Conclusion

My presentation on January 12 only scratched the surface of what .NET Reflector can do.  I hope this post has added more depth, and piqued your curiosity to use the tool to improve your own development experience.  You may find the following links helpful in leveraging .NET Reflector for your own development work:

Candied Sweet Potatoes

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Last month (for Thanksgiving), my dad, sister, a few cousins and I cooked so mom could have a break. The food turned out so well, she asked us to do it again for Christmas–including a candied sweet potato recipe I cobbled together from different ones on the internet. The recipe is below.

Ingredients
4-5 lbs of sweet potatoes
1 20oz can of crushed pineapple
1 1/2 cups of dark brown sugar
1 1/4 cup of I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter
cinnamon, nutmeg, & ginger to taste

Instructions
Fill an 8qt pot 2/3rds of the way with water. Bring to a boil. Boil the sweet potatoes for 15 minutes. Drain and set aside to cool for peeling and slicing later.

In a saucepan, melt the I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter, add the brown sugar and stir. Add cinnamon, nutmeg, and ginger until the sauce tastes how you want it.

After you’ve peeled and sliced the sweet potatoes, lay down a layer of them, drizzle/smear on some of the sauce, and sprinkle on some of the crushed pineapple. Repeat until you’ve filled whatever casserole dish or foil pan you’re using.

Bake this at 425 degrees for 90 minutes.

The problem with exit interviews

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The biggest problem with exit interviews is that they’re too little, too late. I had an exit interview recently (since I accepted an offer to go elsewhere), and there wasn’t anything wrong with the questions–it was just that nothing could be done about any of the concerns I raised.

The second major problem with exit interviews is that they focus too narrowly. All the feedback from exit interviews comes from people who’ve decided to leave. Assuming a company has had relatively low turnover for awhile, the feedback could be leaving out information from as much as 90% of its workforce.

If a company is serious about employee retention, they need to get feedback from as much of their workforce as possible on a regular basis. In my exit interview, I got questions about benefits, commute, holidays, and other issues. Regular, anonymous surveys on those issues would probably reveal a lot of useful information about ways benefits could be improved. Gathering this kind of information regularly will mean that at least some (if not most) of the answers you get will be from people who still have a stake in the company’s future.

Deleting TFS Tasks

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I changed the state of a TFS task I was working on recently, only to discover the workflow wouldn’t let me return it to it’s prior state.  Until today, I didn’t know it was possible to delete TFS tasks if you made a mistake in changing one.  But some Googling revealed a blog post that explained how to delete tasks.

The direction of the slashes for the URL can point forward (/) instead of backward () and the witadmin.exe destroywi /Collection:<TFS url> /id:<Task id> command still works.

Filtering Heterogeneous Arrays in .NET

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One of the bugs I was recently asked to fix for an application required me to determine whether or not to display one of the members of a list.  This proved somewhat challenging since the lists in question were heterogeneous (two difference subtypes of an abstract base class).  It turned out that LINQ provides a nice solution to this sort of problem in the form of the OfType<T> method.

Given an IEnumerable collection with elements of multiple types, calling OfType<T> on the collection where T is the desired type will return a collection containing only elements of type T.  Before learning about OfType<T>, I’d been using the Cast<T> method.  This was fine as long as all the collection elements were of the type T I wanted.  The moment this wasn’t the case, my LINQ query threw a cast exception.  OfType<T> seems to work similarly to the “as” operator in C#, in that it doesn’t complain if a list element isn’t type T–it simply excludes it from the returned collection.

PowerGUI and .NET Framework 4.0

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On my current project, we use PowerShell scripts to automate our UI testing.  We’ve been writing and running the scripts in the PowerGUI Script Editor, an excellent tool that’s also free.  When we upgraded our application to run on version 4.0 of the .NET Framework from 3.5, we lost the ability to run PowerShell scripts in debug mode from PowerGUI.

The only work-around for this I’ve found (at least until a version of PowerGUI built on .NET 4.0 comes out), is a registry hack that forces all the .NET apps on the machine to use the latest version of the CLR.  You can find more details in this user discussion at powergui.org, or this discussion on stackoverflow.com.

New MSBuild 4.0 Features

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My current assignment has me working with the application build again.  MSBuild 4.0 got a number of new features which I’m only now getting to take advantage of.  The coolest one so far is the extensible task factory.  It lets you define custom MSBuild tasks right in the project file, instead of having to create a separate DLL for them.  Andrew Arnott wrote a custom factory that lets you define custom MSBuild tasks using PowerShell.  Because we’re using PowerShell for UI automation testing of our application, we’ll soon be able to integrate those tests into our build system.

Another feature I just learned about is conditional constructs.  They provide functionality equivalent to a case statement you might see in other languages. It’s much more flexible than the Condition attribute available on most MSBuild tasks.