Spending some time with great speakers from Microsoft

I’m posting this as I’m in the same room with Scott Guthrie and he’s answering our questions :) Oh boy, he’s showing tons and tons of demos and features! And his presentation slides is a notepad text file containing all the points that he wants to cover. That’s a geek. I love it!

You might ask: why is that and who is us?

“Us” is a selection of Microsoft Student Partners from all around the world (like approximately 40). And the reason for that coming together is the first Microsoft Student Partner Summit that has been organized by the leaders of the student partner program, Leandro Doeyo and Jennifer Perret.

Today is already the second day of the summit. Yesterday we had a selection of cool speaker from all Microsoft who gave us insides (and I speak about deep dives into the technology) on different technologies, such as

  • Live Mesh: the new cool kid in the town
  • OSS: the Microsoft Open Source effort. Yeah, you read right, Microsoft has open source software
  • Popfly: and how to create cool games with Popfly.

  • Silverlight: oh so much insides :)
  • and tons of other topics.

The most interesting talk yesterday was the panel with bloggers from Microsoft, such as Major Nelson and Jeff Sandquist.

Another great event was the party that we had in the evening yesterday. Imagine the top floor of a skyscraper in Bellevue downtown with view over Seattle and Lake Washington. Tons of Xboxes and cool games, such as Halo 3 (4 on 4), Soul Calibur, Rockband 2 and Lego Batman. Food, drinks and music. It was GREAT! Today we are going to have another party again… let’s see where we end up today :)

Published on Sep 26th, 2008 — Tags: , , , ,
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Microsoft Source Analysis for C#

Microsoft has released a source analysis tool for C#. The tool analyzes the source code of your C# solution and validates it against a set of rules. A set of rules is perhaps a little bit an understatement: it’s a huuuuge mass of rules.

The tool integrates into Visual Studio 2008 or Visual Studio 2005 and can be executed from there. The official blog posting about the release sums it up as follows:

We are very excited to announce the release of a new developer tool from Microsoft, Source Analysis for C#. This tool is known internally within Microsoft as StyleCop, and has been used for many years now to help teams enforce a common set of best practices for layout, readability, maintainability, and documentation of C# source code.

Source Analysis is similar in many ways to Microsoft Code Analysis (specifically FxCop), but there are some important distinctions. FxCop performs its analysis on compiled binaries, while Source Analysis analyzes the source code directly. For this reason, Code Analysis focuses more on the design of the code, while Source Analysis focuses on layout, readability and documentation. Most of that information is stripped away during the compilation process, and thus cannot be analyzed by FxCop.

The ultimate goal of Source Analysis is to allow you to produce elegant, consistent code that your team members and others who view your code will find highly readable.

It’s interesting to note that the tool has been in use by Microsoft for several years. Still, it seems to have some issues; I don’t know if these issues are just in the public release or have also been in the private one. Another reason might also be that I’m just to dumb to understand how to use it…

For me the bugs are the following: It seems as if the tool doesn’t scan all the files of the solution. Also, it is impossible to make it scan each project independent. There is a menu entry to do that (right click on the project to get there) but the tool seems to ignore what has been clicked. It outputs the scan results of a random files scan.

Another thing that bothers me very much is that the rule that doesn’t allow you to use tabs as way to indent code (the rule fires for each indent that you did by using a tab and tells you to use spaces) is enabled by default.

What a pitty! How can somebody rely on spaces as way to indent code… I never understood that and that’s also the first thing that I always have to change after having installed Visual Studio. Tabs are way more customizable. Spaces suck because you can never customize the space they indent. With tabs you set the tab size and you are done. People who like (or even need; not all see like a hawk) a bigger indentation are lost with spaces (they are lost in spaces, hehe). Not to mention that with spaces everybody in the team needs to use the same amout of spaces for the indention! It’s a shame the more you think about it.

I hope these are issues that get fixed very soon; and since the project has been published in the MSDN code gallery we are all free to share the feedback with the team.

Published on May 23rd, 2008 — Tags: , , ,
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