Disposable C# Snippets

Visual Studio code snippets were brought up a couple times today.  Which reminded me of the only two snippets I’ve ever written and used.  I think they’re useful to save me some typing.  In C# whenever you have some class that is holding onto unmanaged resources, or even a lot of managed resources, you really need to make it IDisposable.  The problem is it’s a fair amount of repetitive typing to get there. 

A Generic Factory in C#

There is this really popular OOP design pattern that we at Tranxition, and other developers elsewhere, use frequently.  Years ago, after reading about the factory pattern in the GOF book I immediately thought of some possible uses for it in my work.  I was really excited to code it up… the first time.  After having writing the code for one factory though, it was clear to me it should just be a library and there were some things overlooked by most example implementations.

Testing a Task

In my previous post I described the creation of a custom MSBuild task to aid in building WiX projects under TFS. However, one thing I have always disliked about most of the code nuggets found on blogs and magazine articles, which I find highly inexcusable in today’s development landscape, is that they rarely include any tests to prove that their code actually works. Therefore, this post is intended to demonstrate that throwing in a few simple unit tests with code samples is easy and goes a long way toward helping readers understand and trust the code being published.

A custom task for building WiX under MSBuild (TFS)

My name is Shawn (Hempel) and this is my first submission to the Tranxcoder blog, which is a little ironic since I think it was my idea in the first place. Nonetheless, at least now I am officially “on the board” (and the team can stop razzing me about not posting.)

It seems I’ll be continuing on a running theme of writing about making Team Foundation Server work for us in new and scary ways. If you’re wondering why so much of our blog has centered on that topic, I think it’s two parts: 1) in many ways TFS customization is neither easy or intuitive so as we struggle to make things work, we want to share that with the development community; and 2) since our build process has little to do with the logic in our products, it’s easy to put this stuff out here without worrying about giving away intellectual property. That said, there will probably be more non-build related content as time goes on – we’ll just change variable names to protect the innocent. Alright, on to the good stuff…

As previously mentioned by Richard, we use the WiX toolset to generate Windows Installer binaries (MSI/MSM) for our applications. Personally, I find the recent builds of Votive (WiX’s Visual Studio integration package) to be quite helpful and easy to work with. One of the things it does very well is enable a simple F5 installer build. What it does not do, however, is help you in any way once you decide to graduate from building on the desktop to incorporating an installer build in your TFS processes. Specifically, there will almost certainly be some trouble with the relative and/or absolute paths used in your WiX source files to locate the build outputs to package. Read on to find out how we first solved that problem in a way that made it hard to sleep at night, and subsequently replaced it with a robust, maintainable solution.