Windows Technical Off Topic Mailing List

This mailing list is for all the Off Topic messages from all of the other Windows-centric technical mailing lists I belong to, i.e. ATL, DCOM, DOTNET and GENX. These messages are typically marked [OT], [OOT], [VERY OT], or whatever. Sometimes this seems like most of the content on these lists, and often the most interesting, but since it's "off topic", folks are often flamed for their posts. Since I found this unfair, I thought I'd start a list for just these kinds of posts.

This mailing list is also for news and support of the various bits and pieces on the sellsbrothers.com site, including tools, the spout, etc. I'll use it to announce new stuff and you can use it to suggest new stuff, including topics for the spout, bugs or feature suggestions on the tools, Microsoft interview stories, etc. Subscribe here.

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Managed Developer's Links

Since we're entering a new world split between managed and unmanaged development (of course, Java developer's have been there for a long time already), I thought it appropriate to split the links between managed and unmanaged code.

• Microsoft .NET Framework Service Pack 1.
• Tomas Restrepo has provided a Win32 memory-mapped file wrapper for .NET.
• Brent Rector ported his random number library to .NET.  It provides commercial quality random deviate functions (Uniform, Gaussian, Poisson, et cetera).
• If you're into OpenGL, there's a .NET OpenGL wrapper called CsGL.
• Shawn Wildermuth (the ADO Guy) has a managed provider for XML and the associated XPath navigator.
• Hunter Stone has a visual .config file editor.
• Microsoft provides FxCop, is a GUI tool that can check your assemblies for design problems described in the .NET Framework Design Guidelines. It's seeded with more than 100 rules and is extensible to include your own rules. Also, it rocks. Apparently the codename was ".NET Professor".
• Justin Rudd provides a .NET logger called LogKit.NET.
• Actipro Software provides several WinForms add-ons, including wizards, dockable windows, a tag strip panel and a syntax highlighting editor.
• DeKlarit is a Visual Studio .NET add-in for building your apps via customizable codegen, with specific support for database-based systems.
• Microsoft has released the ODBC managed provider for .NET separately from the framework itself.
• Johannes Kepler has posted a C# implementation of Coco/R, a compiler-generator.
• Southern Storm Software is building DotGNU Portable.NET, their own open source implementation .NET.
• Shawn VanNess has posted a Gen<X>code generator that generates type-safe collections for a given type. Since Gen<X> is a commercial tool, Shawn has also provided a version for the freeware Gen<X> prototype, TextBox. The TextBox friendly version is available here.
• Leo A. Notenboom has written a thorough article about how to write an add-in to VS.NET.
• For those of you interested in what programs in the various .NET languages look like, e.g. APL, Eiffel, Haskell, Objective Caml, COBOL, etc, check out this page that lists more than 300 samples in more than 100 languages.
• Intel has a beta of the updated VTune performance analysis tool for .NET. Microsoft keeps a list of .NET language implementations. GotDotNet also has a list. I keep waiting for a full CLOS.NET implementation... If you're into Knuth, you might be interested in MIX.NET.
• Nick Edwards has some cool .NET tools on his site, among them a VS.NET add-in that checks spelling in your XML and comments and a visual C# lint tool.
• Mike Woodring has some wonderful remoting and configuration samples on his .NET Sample Page.
• Aaron Skonnard has some cool .NET XML tools, including some interesting implementations of XmlReader that wrap the Registry, the file system, etc. This technique is a wonderful way to import custom data into .NET.
• Jason Diamond provides a converter that generates NAnt build files from VS.NET project files.
• Gerry Shaw provides NAnt, a .NET version of the popular Ant build tool and a free .NET ZIP file compression library.
• John Gough, author of the most excellent Compiling for the .NET Common Language Runtime, has a nice paper comparing the .NET Common Language Runtime to the Java Virtual Machine.
• NDoc is a .NET documentation tool to format the codedoc comments of C#.
• Drew Marsh has updated his .NETUnit framework, an implementation of Kent Beck's XUnit testing framework for unit testing components written for .NET.
• Philip Craig also has a .NET implementation of XUnit, called NUnit.
• Christian Sepulveda has another .NET implementation of XUnit called dotUNIT.
• DevComponents.com provides a component called DotNetBar that provides Office XP like menus and toolbars as well as a .NET HTML DOM wrapper.
• .NET 247 is a .NET information site.
• Jay Freeman's metadata+IL to .NET source code tool, Anakrino, is available here.
• Brent Rector's .NET metadata+IL obfuscation tool, Demeanor, to defeat tools like Anakrino, is available here.
• Carlos Perez has built VS.NET-style menus in .NET.
• Lutz Roeder has built a coolbar wrapper for .NET.
• Microsoft's India team built a .NET Java compiler that includes JDK 1.1.4 support. Wow.
• csharpindex.com provides a nice index of downloadable tools, including some C# parser generators.
• A Designable PropertyTree for VS.NET: Russell Morris has built an implementation of the PropertyTree control that you see in VS.NET's Project Properties dialog. What makes this really cool is that Russell's control is a great example of what to do to integrate with the VS.NET Forms Designer.
• Mono: The open source implementation of .NET. Also, some pictures of what it looks like.
• SharpDevelop: The open source development environment for .NET.
• Intel's open source implementation of the Common Language Infrastructure (Microsoft's implementation is called .NET).
• My own Visual Studio .NET: Managed Extensions Bring .NET CLR Support to C++.
• DevelopMentor's .NET mailing list.
• Microsoft's "Got .NET" web site.
• DevX's .NET Framework, Visual Studio.NET, and ASP.NET Developer Resources.
• Lutz Roeder's Programming .NET page. Of course, Reflector, an object browser for .NET assemblies, is what you absolutely need from this site if you're going to be a .NET developer. The .NET clone of Boulderdash is fun, too.
• .NET Framework SDK
• .NET Framework Redistributable
• VS.NET MSDN Member Download
• About Upgrading .NET

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Unmanaged Developer's Links

Normally I detest pages that list "My Favorite Links." However, here I've listed links that I think people should know, whether they want to or not. This also saves me from remembering them when I'm on the road...

• Kim Grasman provides tlb2const, a little code generator called that will generate VBS or JS constants from a COM tlb.
• Tim Tabor has finally posted a list of his tools, including, but not limited to, the following:
  • ShellSpy: a tool to spy on shell events.
  • tlb2xml: a tool to generate XML from a COM Type Library (for simplified inspection).
  • IE Clarify button: renders hard-to-read Web pages more visually accessible.
  • Image Explorer: a tool to explore bitmaps, icons, and cursors in running processes.
  • PdhTool: a small GUI application for collecting system and application data measured by the performance data helper library.
• Jonas Blunck provides ComTrace, a little utility that lets you see COM activity within a process. It will show calls made to the COM library as well as calls made on interfaces.
• COM Case Studies.
• From the MS Researce site, the Tony Williams internal documents that drove the formation of COM: Object Architecture Closures, Dealing with the Unknown and On Inheritance: What It Means and How To Use It.
• DCE RPC Application Engineering Specification. This is the wire format for all data types in COM except object references (interface pointers).
• COM Specification. This is where it all started.
• DCOM Protocol. This is what COM is on the wire.
• Where do GUIDs come from? The uuid: URI scheme.
• The Vivid Creations ATL Class Diagram. This diagram was created using CodeVizor.
• The OpenGroup folks are selling the source code to DCOM.
• Don Box. The Crown Prince of COM. The Duke of DCOM. The Wizard of the Wire Rep. "'nuf said."
  • Don's COM ISAPI DLL Generator.
  • Don's Privacy-enhanced GUIDGEN.
  • Don's XML-based IPropertyBag implementation.
  • Don's wbstring class (completion left as an exercise for the community).
  • Don's TLB/DLL translation tools for using with COM+ LCE.
  • Don's structwrap for using Record-VARIANTs.
  • Don's MBVDelegator.
  • Don's enumgen.
  • Don's COM+ shell utility.
  • Don's IMallocSpy implementation.
  • Don's YACL (including the ever popular ustring classes).
  • Don's GIPLIP.
• Michael Nelson. COM Wunderkin. This is where you'll find the latest DCOMPERM and DCOM Bridge implementations.
• Keith "COM in ASM" Brown. Gotta love that delegator stuff, plus he maintains the modern COM Security FAQ.
• Martin Gudgin. The MTS guy from across the pond.
• Bob Beauchemin's OLEDB Tools page.
• Jason Whittington's Managed Space blog. Also, check out his nifty ComSpy utility. Wahoo!
• Aaron Skonnard's personal home page.
• Matt Pietrek's TINYCRT. With the state of the MS CRT as it is, Matt provides a nice replacement. Also, here's his homepage .
• John Robbins Bugslayer Home Page. Look here for nifty information on how to solve the "My program went on vacation and all I got with this lousy address" problem.
• Tom Armstrong's home page.
• Andrew Nosenko's AtlAux extensions to ATL.
• Dharma Shukla's COM page with fun CoHackXxx APIs.
• Lutz Roeder's Compact COM framework.
• Hugh Brown's COM programmer tools, include a COM version of the Unix whereis command and a SAFEARRAY wrapper template.
• Ray Brown's COM STL Bridge.
• Ben Hickman's ATL and COM Common Knowledge.
• Kjell Tangen's COM samples, including a multi-dispatch implementation.
• Valery Pryamikov's COM samples.
• Shaun Wilde's ATL page featuring a tray icon class for ATL and Attila.
• Reveal 2.0, a tool for monitoring the COM server self-registration process..
• Microsoft's Mailing Lists. I hang out on the DCOM and ATL mailing lists.
• Microsoft's Mailing List Archives. Please look here before posting. Thanks.
• Stingray's ATL FAQ.
• Alexei Kvasov's HRPlus tool.
• Joe O'Leary's project page, which includes a CString replacement.
• Simon Fell's COM Stuff.
• Linar's implementation of the DCOM protocol in raw Java.
• Kenneth Kasajian's much more robust implementation of VARIANT streaming code than ATL's.
• Dejan Jelovic's home page, which lists, among other things, an interesting article called C++ Without Memory Errors, where he characterizes garbage collection as a cure worse than the disease. Wahoo!
• Boost.org is a great site for semi-official extensions to STL. Great stuff.
• Martin Lapierre has a nice set of ATL extension classes, which specialize in persisting objects and marshaling objects that represent their state using STL containers.
• Bjarke Viksoe has some really great ATL and WTL-based sample code, not the least of which is a docking window framework for WTL.
• 4 Developers has a cool utility to track down installation and dependency problems with your COM servers called COM Explorer.
• Visual Basic: Inspect COM Components Using the TypeLib Information Object Library
• TX Text Control is an ActiveX component that allows you to add advanced text processing features to your applications.
• COMUnit, an extreme programming testing framework for COM.
• Reggie, Shawn Vanness's most excellent regsvr32/regtlb replacement with real error messages and support for EXEs.