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Power Toys Pack Installer
What’s better than a useful Visual Studio Add-in? Why, an automatic installer that downloads a list of
useful add-ins and lets you select them and install at once, that’s what! The Power Toys Pack Installer,
shown in Figure B-12, is an open source CodePlex project that downloads a feed full of at least three
dozen projects, samples, starter kits and extensions that can be selected and installed en masse.
Figure B-12
The selection is cherry-picked from projects and downloads all over Microsoft. Some highlights include
Microsoft. NET Interfaces for Skype and starter kits for creating your own Shareware. Developer tools
include ILMerge, a utility for merging multiple .NET assemblies into a single assembly, the Internet
Explorer Developer Toolbar mentioned earlier in this chapter, a Managed Stack Explorer for investigating
application hangs, and XML Notepad 2007, an experimental interface for browsing and editing XML
documents. There are also choice Add-Ins such as the VS Source Outliner, giving you a tree view of your
project’s member and types for use as an alternative navigational method. A few tools aren’t ready for
Visual Studio 2008, but I expect to see them updated, given community pressure.
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Extending ASP.NET
‘‘Oh man! :-) I have shoot into my foot myself ;-) Sorry!’’ — matz.’’
ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit
The AJAX Control Toolkit is a collaboration between Microsoft and the larger ASP.NET community.
Its goal was to provide the largest collection of Web client components available. It includes excellent
examples if you want to learn how to write ASP.NET Ajax yourself, and then it gives you the opportunity
to give back and have your code shared within the community.
There are literally dozens of controls that build on and extend the ASP.NET Ajax framework. Some of
the controls are simple and provide those nice ‘‘little touches’’ such as drop shadows, rounded corners,
watermarks, and animations. Others provide highly functional controls such as calendars, popups, and
sliders.
Complete source is available for all the controls so that they can be extended and improved by you. These

controls are more than just samples; they are complete and ready to be used in your applications.
There’s a complete demo site available at
/>showcasing examples
of each control so you can try each one to see if it meets your needs, as illustrated in Figure B-13, for
example.
Figure B-13
Note that there are two versions one for Visual Studio 2005 and one for Visual Studio 2008. Features
that are specific to the 2008 version include ‘‘reference tags’’ for toolkit JavaScript files providing more
complete JavaScript IntelliSense support within Visual Studio.
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Atif Aziz’s ELMAH — Error Logging Modules and Handlers
Troubleshooting errors and unhandled exceptions in your applications can be a full-time job. Rather
than writing your own custom global exception handlers every time, consider looking at the ELMAH
(Error Logging Modules And Handlers) from Atif Aziz. It’s a very flexible application-wide error logging
facility with pluggable extension points to the interfaces at nearly every location. You can even configure
it in your application without re-compilation or even redeployment. Simply modify your
web.config
to
include the error logging modules and handlers, and then you’ll receive a single Web page to remotely
review the entire log of unhandled exceptions.
ELMAH captures so much information about exceptions that it can reconstitute the original ‘‘yellow
screen of death’’ that ASP.NET would have generated given an exception, even if customErrors was
turned off. It’s almost like TiVo for your exceptions! Figure B-14 shows ELMAH, providing a developer’s
view, including all the details you might need to debug this error.
Figure B-14
Another clever feature is an RSS feed that shows the last 15 years from your log. This flexible tool is open
source and the recent beta includes support for medium trust environments. You can plug in SQL Server
or use an XML file to manage your error logs. I highly recommend you take the time to learn about

ELMAH.
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Helicon’s ISAPI_Rewrite
Users of the Apache Web server sing the praises of the power of
mod_rewrite
, their URL rewriting
mechanism. IIS users have this available to them in the form of the ISAPI Rewrite module from Helicon.
It’s incredibly fast because it’s written in pure C. It integrates nicely with ASP.NET because URLs are
rewritten before ASP.NET realizes anything has happened.
Because it uses regular expressions, it can initially be very frustrating due to its terse syntax. However, if
you are patient, it can be an incredibly powerful tool for your tool belt.
I recently discovered that there were a dozen ways to visit my blog that all lead to the same location.
This was a confusing Google because it appeared that my blog had multiple addresses. I wanted not only
to canonicalize my URL but also send back a 301 HTTP redirect to search indexes, thereby raising my
standing within the search by appearing to have only one official URL.
For example, all of these links were valid ways to reach my blog:
❑
www.hanselman.com/blog/
❑
www.hanselman.com/blog/default.aspx
❑
www.hanselman.com/blog
❑
/>❑
/>❑
/>❑
www.hanselman.com/blog/Default.aspx
❑

www.computerzen.com/blog/
❑
www.computerzen.com
❑
/>❑
/>Notice that there’s a difference between a trailing slash and no trailing slash in the eyes of a search engine.
Using ISAPI Rewrite, I created this rather terse but very effective configuration file:
[ISAPI_Rewrite]
RewriteRule /blog/default
\
.aspx http
\
://www.hanselman.com/blog/ [I,RP]
RewriteCond Host: ^hanselman
\
.com
RewriteRule (.*) http
\
://www.hanselman.com$1 [I,RP]
RewriteCond Host: ^computerzen
\
.com
RewriteRule (.*) http
\
://www.hanselman.com$1 [I,RP]
RewriteCond Host: ^www.computerzen
\
.com
RewriteRule (.*) http
\

://www.hanselman.com/blog/ [I,RP]
The I and RP at the end of the line indicate that this match is case insensitive and the redirect should
be permanent rather than temporary. The rules that include a $1 at the end of line cause the expression
to include any path after the domain name. This allows the rule to apply site-wide and provides these
benefits to every single page on my site. It’s powerful and that’s worth your time.
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General Purpose Developer Tools
‘‘If you get the dirty end of the stick, sharpen it and turn it into a useful tool’’ — Colin Powell
Telerik’s Online Code Converter
Creating samples that should appear in both C# and Visual Basic can be very tedious without the assis-
tance of something like Telerik’s CodeChanger.com.
While it’s not an officially supported tool, this little application will definitely get you 80 percent of the
way when converting between Visual Basic and C#.
It also understands a surprising number of rather obscure syntaxes, as shown in Figure B-15, where I
tried to convert an immediate
if
from C#’s
?:
syntax to VB’s
IIf
syntax. It’s not only useful for the
writer, and blog author, but also anyone who’s trying to switch projects between the two languages.
Figure B-15
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WinMerge and Differencing Tools
Everyone has their favorite merge tool. Whether yours is WinMerge (Figure B-16), or Beyond Compare,

or the old standby WinDiff, just make sure that you have one in your list of tools that you’re very famil-
iar with. When managing large numbers of changes across large numbers of individuals on software
development teams, a good merge tool can help you untangle even the most complicated conflicting
checkins.
Figure B-16
A number of different plug-ins are available for WinMerge that extend its functionality to include com-
parison of Word and Excel documents and XML files.
Other highly recommended merge tools include Beyond Compare from Scooter Software and DiffMerge
from SourceGear. Each of these three tools integrates with Windows Explorer, so the comparing files are
as easy as a right-click.
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Reflector
If you’re not using Reflector, your .NET developer experience is lesser for it. Reflector is an object
browser, decompiler, help system, powerful plug-in host, and incredible learning tool. This tiny util-
ity from Microsoft developer Lutz Roeder is consistently listed as the number one most indispensable
tool available to the .NET developer after Visual Studio.
Reflector is amazing because it not only gives you a representation of the programmer’s intent by trans-
forming IL back into C# or VB, but it includes analysis tools that help you visualize dependencies between
methods in the .NET Base Class Library and within your code or any third party code. In Figure B-17,
you can see not only a C# representation of the code inside System. RolePrincipal, but more importantly
the methods that use it within the framework. You can continue on as deep as you want within the
theoretical call stack.
Figure B-17
While Reflector’s decompilation abilities may become less useful with the release of the Base Class
Library source code under the Microsoft Reference License, its abilities as an object browser and its
vibrant plug-in community will keep this tool on the top shelf for years to come.
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CR_Documentor
CR_Documentor (Figure B-18) is another free plug-in that uses the DxCore extension technology from
DevExpress. This tool is a collaboration between developer Travis Illig and Reflector author Lutz Roeder.
Figure B-18
This add-on allows you to see a preview of your XML document comments in real time as you edit them
within your source code in Visual Studio.
CR_Documentor lets you choose your level of compliance including support for the now-defunct-but-
still-useful NDoc project as well as Microsoft specific tags for use with the Microsoft ‘‘Sandcastle’’
Documentation building suite of tools.
CR_Documentor also includes context menu support with snippets and helpful templates making it
much easier to visualize complicated documentation. XML documentation source code provides all the
tools and tags needed to make MSDN-quality help. CR_Documentor provides that last missing piece in
the form of excellent and accurate visualization. It’s indispensable if you intend on building compiled
help files from your source code.
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Process Explorer
Last, but unquestionably not least, is Process Explorer from Mark Russinovich. To call it ‘‘Task Manager
on steroids’’ would not even begin to do it justice. Process Explorer puts windows itself under a micro-
scope by allowing you to peer inside your active processes, their threads, and the environment to get
a clearer understanding about what is actually going on. Advanced and detailed use of this tool, along
with the entire SysInternals Suite of Tools, should be required for all developers.
In Figure B-19, I’m looking at the properties dialog box of an application running under the Visual Studio
2008 Web Server while a debugging session in process. I can see the process tree, the DLLs loaded into
the Web server’s process, their versions, and their paths, making this an excellent tool for debugging
assembly loading and versioning issues.
Figure B-19
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Summary
Having the right tools can mean the difference between a week of time spent in your head against the
wall versus five minutes of quick analysis in debugging. The right tool can mean the difference between
a tedious and keyboard-heavy code slogging or refactoring session that is actually pleasant. I encourage
you to try each of the tools listed here as well as to explore the ecosystem of available tools to find those
that make your development experience not just more productive but more enjoyable.
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