I vaguely remember remember reading about a (new?) tool that can diff a computer. I think it was from Microsoft aimed at developers and it could find difference in files, file versions, registry keys, etc.
Now we need this tool for a project where an installer has gone bad.
Anyone know what tool it is? Or similar tools?
You might want to try the beta of Microsoft's
Attack Surface Analyzer
I also found this comercial product: http://www.blueproject.ro/systracer
Related
I work on Windows. Lately, I have been using a lot of LaTeX and I ShareLaTeX is not available to me. I want an offline software for Windows. Now I know that there are many, but which is the best to go for? please Help!
I personally prefer WinEdt. I like the interface and have never had any issues with it!
http://www.winedt.com/news.html
Can someone offer please a free software that will be able to replace VSS 2005 for me? I can't afford to pay for it.
Thanks.
There are lots - which one you should use depends on the specifics of how you work.
At the moment my personal favourite is Mercurial which is distributed - there is a very good introduction to how using distributed version control works here - Hg Init: a Mercurial tutorial.
I personally find that distributed version control works really well for me, but if you are looking for something that behaves a little more like VSS then you might want to look into alternatives such as Subversion which is widely used and very mature.
ok there are a ton. I would suggest using the googly and doing a search for something like open source source control. Take a look here.
Although, there are plenty, I would recommend you to try SVN, it's a centralized SVN and comes very close to Visual Source Safe, I see that the recommended answer recommends Mercurial, but it looks like SVN will work out for anybody that want to move over. We did a massive migration a year back from VSS to SVN without any issues.
We've got this large application written in Delphi 5, and development is ongoing to this day. There is research going on into migrating to newer versions, but so far there is no success, as some 3rd party components have not been updated in ages and do not work on later versions.
In the meantime however people need to continue work on it. Now Delphi 5 IDE is no real treat. It's pretty bug-ridden and lacks a lot of features of contemporary IDEs which makes it difficult to use. Especially when it comes to debugging.
So I was wondering - would it be possible to use Visual Studio in the process? As far as I know the .PDB file format is pretty old and is well documented. Could it be possible to make the Delphi compiler to somehow generate a .PDB files for it's compiled results? Then the program could be debugged with Visual Studio, possibly to a much greater extent than in the original IDE.
Well, the absolute Holy Grail would be to move all development to VS, just keeping the compiler from Delphi, but I imagine that would be pretty impossible.
No, and neither can any other version of Delphi. You can use Map2Dgb to turn a detailed map file into a dbg file, though, and you can use that in WinDbg.
I'm curious what debugging features you're expecting to use in Visual Studio that aren't in Delphi 5 and that also don't rely on the IDE understanding the Delphi language. I was always rather pleased with Delphi 5.
BTW, you can vote for this feature here.
Note, that VS-compatitible debug info will be useful not only for debugging application (I agree: it's better to use Delphi), but it will be useful for using tools like Process Explorer. For example, Process Explorer may be able to show human-readable call stack, instead of RAW numbers.
I've tried tds2pdb and it works great for me.
Apparently you can't. Seems that PDB is after all a propieritary Microsoft format without documentation, and as such there are no other tools generating it. Pity. :(
I would recommend moving to a later version of Delphi. We have done this with various applications for clients. Moving to a newer version of Delphi is normally straightforward, but there were issues moving from D5 to D6 due to changes in the way components were handled (design time code being separated from run time) and the change to Unicode in D2009 was a bigger change.
The main thing is to sort out the third party components. We only ever use third party components that come with source so if the worst happens and the vendor disappears, we can still work on the components ourselves.
Which components are causing the issues?
I've always used emacs for small projects (and Visual Studio for large ones). I was wondering what the alternatives are for handling a directory structure within emacs, something like the solution explorer in VS. Thank you.
You should also have a look at eproject for something that's more lightweight while also allowing you do to some pretty cool stuff (like project-specific config settings, etc.)
ECB, the Emacs Code Browser, which is built on CEDET, if I am not mistaken, is one you should look at.
Myself, I've always found that I get by well enough using etags and ido-mode. You might also want to look at Speedbar (part of CEDET) as a halfway house between more minimalist solutions and ECB.
I don't use it myself, but it sounds like CEDET is what you are looking for:
Emacs already is a great environment for writing software, but there are additional areas that need improvement. Many new ideas for integrated environments have been developed in newer products, such as Microsoft's Visual environment, JBuilder, or Eclipse. CEDET is a project which implements several advanced features developers have come to expect from an Editor.
The Emacs wiki also has this page with some tips for IDE users.
See also: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Icicles_-_Support_for_Projects.
Is there any way to make an installer that is very user friendly?
I know it's impossible for a Next Next Finished installer but what can I do to ease the process?
Windows platform.
Thanks in advance.
If you've got a very simple application and basically just need to copy a few files, I'd suggest looking at NSIS. It's very simple and you can probably have an installer done in a couple of days.
If you're developing software for a corporate environment where network rollouts are a priority, then you'll probably want to take a closer look at Windows Installer and Windows Installer XML (WiX). (Warning: a very steep learning curve - you'll want to set aside a few weeks and probably read this book to help get started)
If you want the benefits of MSI, without the hassle of learning the underlying technology then a commercial tool such as Installshield is your best bet. It's not cheap but you'll get something out the door pretty quickly.
Long term I'd advise learning Windows Installer technology. It's something overlooked by most developers, it's often seen as crazy voodoo that is overly complicated and unnecessary, in reality it's rather quite simple, just a database with a whole bunch of rules, conditions, and quirks that take a bit of getting used to :)
Try BitNami WAMPStack it is open source and free (you also have Linux and OS X versions)
If I understand your question correctly, I'm not sure how you didn't find this already...
http://www.wampserver.com/en/