Winterdom

Provided the American Airlines problems from this week get sorted out, I'll be attending the MVP Summit again this year. I'll be arriving Sunday pretty late but will be staying until Friday. If anyone wants to meet, chat, or just say Hi, send me an email (tomas at winterdom.com) or...

Yesterday I needed to generate a bunch of small files to use as input for testing, as I needed to reproduce a bug I was tracking down. More to the point, I needed to generate 2000 files of size 781 bytes. Update: I screwed up the code snippets on my...

I've been spending some time this week coding some changes to a custom PowerShell PSHost for an application. One of the changes I wanted to experiment with was changing the code that executed commands so that it used Pipeline.InvokeAsync() instead of Pipeline.Invoke(). There are a couple of things that need...

I've just uploaded a new version of my PipelineTesting library. This one contains just a few minor modifications: A few improved unit tests, and new methods to make it easier to create multi-part messages to use as pipeline inputs. Here's an example of the last one: IBaseMessage message = MessageHelper.Create(...

I created this color scheme a while ago but had not posted it yet. Distant Shores is a low-contrast color scheme with a dark background. I've been using it for a while now and it's fairly usable (particularly on a bright screen); though it is a bit different than most...

I've been using Vim to edit my PowerShell scripts for a while. I get full syntax highlighting and indentation thanks to Peter Provost's excellent scripts: Syntax file Indent file File Type Plugin file These work great most of the time, but a couple of things had been nagging me for...

The first version of Linux I ever used was Slackware 2.3 running one of those pesky 1.X kernels. Since then, one of my all-time favorite utilities has been the Fortune program, which displays quotes on the console when run. <img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="339" alt="fortune"...

A few people have asked already about my PowerShell script for configuring a development environment for .NET / Visual Studio / SDK work, so I thought I might as well break it into it's own script. Here it is: ############################################################################### <br /># Configures the .NET / Visual Studio / Windows...

Nanda Lella's from the Windows SDK team is asking for feedback for the next version of the Platform SDK. Specifically, she asks whether a PowerShell-based build environment (as opposed to the current CMD-based one) would be a welcome addition to the SDK. Personally, I think this is a great idea...

Nick Heppleston wrote a very nice piece on using my PipelineTesting library to test BizTalk Pipeline Components in isolation. Thanks for the kind words, Nick; they are much appreciated! I wrote PipelineTesting for my own needs; I spend a substantial amount of my BizTalk development time working with schemas, pipelines...