Category: Utilities

Any of us that creates software on a day-to-day basis, that's actually used by someone other than yourself, has undoubtedly had to answer technical support questions about your software and/or troubleshoot why it's not working. In a lot of cases, you may have a dedicated support team that interacts directly with your customer base and they only contact you if they come across something they can't resolve or explain. Over time, the support teams tend to become very efficient at resolving application-specific issues regarding setup and configuration. However, when an application is first released, the process isn't so straight-forward and…

I've been putting the finishing touches on a TFS 2008 presentation that I'll be giving at this year's Tulsa TechFest conference later this month and came across a utility that promises to be extremely useful.  It's called NLarge and provides the ability to zoom in and out of a presentation (or any other displayed materials) using a smooth scrolling effect.  NLarge runs in the taskbar notification area and can be activated with a hotkey (Alt+1).  Once activated, the zoom feature can be controlled with the mouse, tablet pen, and/or keyboard.  Although I haven't used this utility during a presentation yet,…

For anyone who has ever had to generate documentation for their .NET projects, you know only too well how difficult and time consuming that can be. There have been a few utilities available in the past that helped out in this area.  One example is NDoc.  NDoc generates some very nice API documentation in several different formats.  However, it doesn't work so well for Visual Studio 2005.  Also, the original developer of NDoc has recently announced that he is dropping future development for NDoc in favor of Sandcastle (as well as other circumstances - although the project may be picked up…

Although the PowerToys for the Visual Studio 2005 Class Designer and Distributed System Designers have been around for a while now (last release was December 1, 2005) I have just recently started to use them. There is some very useful functionality built into these PowerToys. Actually, there is surprising amount of functionality built in and I've only started to make use of some of it.You can download the source code and the installer from the gotdotnet workspace.Here is a list of features:Design Tools EnhancementsDiagram SearchFormatting CommandsFloating Property GridPan/Zoom Window (a personal favorite)Design Surface Scrolling ImprovementsCreate Comments with Double-ClickDesign Surface GridClass…