Does anyone know of a program which works like a Adobe PDF Reader except for .NET solutions?
I develop in a virtual machine but there are times when I just want to open a solution and browse the files. I have no intention of doing any development, I just want to view them.
Does this app exist, or is Notepad++ my best option?
Thanks!
You might want to consider making a simple XSL Transform that can read the SLN and create pretty little list of files for you.. if that's what you mean, otherwise the XML is probably the best you are going to get.
Never heard of a "solution reader." When viewing source files on a system without VS.NET I use Notepad.
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I want to ask you, if it´s somehow possible, to add folder, to sort out Test´s a little bit.. When i am doing in C# parts, there is normally option
right click-> add ->new folder
In F# case, it looks like it´s missing.
I tried to add it even out of VS, via the Win. explorer, but its not working.
Edit: I have found quite poor solution and that´s actually, that you create new folder in C# part and then cut it out and paste to F# section but it´s a bit weird, so any ideas are welcome.
It is not implemented in VS2013 but you can use F# Power Tools extension (http://fsprojects.github.io/VisualFSharpPowerTools/) or create it manually (http://marcinjuraszek.com/2014/03/folders-in-f-projects-how-to-do-it-what-to-avoid.html)
You can either use F# Project Extender or edit the project file manually. Details are here.
Edit: This article explains how to keep your project organized without folders.
I'm currently trying to make a download/install file for a CD, and I've never done this or written any type of coding before so I'm somewhat at a loss. When we last created an installer package (I wasn't employed yet) we used InstalShield, but that was decades ago, and we can't afford the 500$+ price to get it again.
Currently I'm trying to work off the old download package we have. There is the Windows Installer Package (made by InstalShield) called CD Cat v6.msi, and then another file called CDcatv6.exe (which launches a window for the customer to browse options) and then a file called Data.cab which has all the files for the entire catalog in it.
I was thinking perhaps I can just replace a lot of those files with the current information. Replace the CDcatv6.exe file with my v7.exe file (but change the name so its CDcatv6.exe) and then replace all the files in the Data.cab file with the current ones. But that's turning out to be a huge issue.
I did a bit of searching to learn what a .cab file was, and downloaded the Cab File Maker 2.0 (after quite a bit of searching!). I'm having a difficult time using it though, as it wants all the files that I put in it to make the .cab to be in .ddf format. I have no idea what that is, much less how to make it. I tried using 'save as' to do it, but since all the files I need are PDF's there's no option for it and I cant export the files to it either.
I tried looking at other ways that people made Cab files, but I don't know many of the file types or programs their talking about. I'm not a programmer by any means, but I have to learn quick I guess, so any information on how to do this will help greatly. Is it even possible to replace all the files seamlessly and have it work properly? Or is there an easier way to create a fill that the customer can click on and have it download to their desktop?
I don't think simple editing of Data.cab will work. There is installer logic stored in other InstallShield files. It could work if and only if the file set is the same, I mean no files changed its names, no new files added, no new registry entries required etc.
To create a CAB file, use cabarc.exe from Microsoft Windows SDK.
Creating a brand new installer may be a better option. Look at this tools for creating installers:
Advanced Installer
NSIS
WiX toolset (with tutorial)
You best solution is to use dark.exe (part of the WiX toolset).
This will enable to you decompile the MSI and CAB files, edit the installer source as XML and then recompile this into a new executable. Unfortunately this route is not for the faint of heart and what you save on price will cost you in time.
I'm curious how your company created an MSI decades ago, but Sasha is right about time and money trade-offs. However if you're working with Visual Studio, you might try the InstallShield Limited Edition for Visual Studio. It may have enough capabilities to suit your needs.
Thanks for pointing to CABARC, that looks exactly what i was looking for, due to information on:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/bb417343(v=msdn.10)?redirectedfrom=MSDN#top
That make me look how to download it, but i found this post:
Where can I get the cabarc utility?
Where it explains CABARC may be obsolete and there is another utility called MAKECAB that cames with Windows 11, i had try it at command line and it is there.
Thanks a lot.
I'm working on a project which makes substantial use of code generation. Some of the files it generates contain >0.25 million lines of code. VS (2K5) doesn't cope too badly, but R# (4.01) throws an out of memory exception every two minutes or so.
Splitting them out into partial classes/separate files isn't an option in the immediate term, though it may be later.
Are there any clever IDE tricks to dealing with this?
EDIT: so people are immediately saying (very sensibly) 'don't have a file that big' and suggesting ways to break it out into smaller files.
That's fine, but I'm on a time-boxed task taking a look around and deciding what to optimise. My problem is very specifically 'how to view an insanely big file in an IDE without pain', not 'how to refactor the project'. For purposes of the question please imagine the file is read-only. :)
I would at least change huge files extention to something like .cpp_gen or .cpp_huge to remove syntax highlighting, outlining etc. and then reassign build tool back to C/C++ compiler tool for them.
Seems like this R# tool (is that Resharper?) is the problem. Can you disable it?
Otherwise, changing the file type for the generated code might make sense - presumably, you aren't going to be doing major editing on those files, so losing syntax coloring and other features specific to source files wouldn't be an issue.
WOW!
250 000 lines of code?
you should think not in a machine point of view, but in a human been point of view. Let's say that you want to pass that code to someone else, can you see the time to see what the code does?
Design Patterns were made to deal with this ind stuff, try to start small, refactoring it, then go deeper and start applying more D.P.
you will have less and less lines of code, and Yes, one of the best tricks is to separate into several files according to it's propose.
Assuming you're not hand-editing your generated code. (=BAD IDEA!!)
You could put the generated files in a separate solution that you compile from the command line and then reference those dll's from the project you're working in.
Is the problem when you open the file for editing in Visual Studio? I've noticed that VS editor can be quite slow and inefficient on large files. Also, you could try turning off certain options, e.g. word-wrapping kills my machine for some reason.
Otherwise you could use something else like Textpad with syntax highlighting installed to edit the problematic large source file... not as nice, for sure.
Don't use visual studio. There is too much going on in VS.
Since the file is read only, you wont be using any IDE features (Intellisense, Refactoring tools, formatting).
You will probably get better performance using a simpler application, such as notepad++ for simply viewing the file. Notepad++ will do standard language highlighting if you like color.
Can't you break up the files and use the preprocessor to bring them back together when you compile?
It must be possible somehow to group large chunks of those files in separate libraries. You'd then separate them into several projects. Tried this? What the is the current structure of your source code/ project?
Are there any free tools available to view the contents of the solution user options file (the .suo file that accompanies solution files)?
I know it's basically formatted as a file system within the file, but I'd like to be able to view the contents so that I can figure out which aspects of my solution and customizations are causing it grow very large over time.
A bit late for the original poster, but maybe useful to others.
Two freeware viewers for structured storage files (including .suo-files):
https://github.com/ironfede/openmcdf (old URL: http://sourceforge.net/projects/openmcdf/)
http://www.mitec.cz/ssv.html (free for non-commercial use)
When you open a .suo file in one of these viewers, you will see streams related to:
Bookmarks
Debugger watches
Unloaded projects
Outlining
Task-list user tasks
Debugger exceptions
Debugger Breakpoints
Debugger find source data
Open document windows
And much more...
The .SUO file is effectively disposable. If it's getting too large, just delete it. Visual Studio will create a fresh one.
If you do want to go poking around in it, it looks like an OLE Compound Document File. You should be able to use the StgOpenStorage function to get hold of an IStorage pointer.
I'm not aware of a tool, but you could write a Visual Studio extension to list the contents without too much work.
If you download the Visual Studio SDK, it has some straightforward examples that you can use. Find one that looks appropriate (like maybe the Toolwindow, if you want to give yourself a graphical display) and lift it (for your own personal use, of course).
What makes it easy is that the Package class which you implement in any VS extension, already implements the IVSPersistSolutionOpts, as aku mentioned. So you can just call the ReadUserOptions method on your package and inspect the contents.
I don't know any tool, but you can try to access user settings via IVsPersistSolutionOpts interface
You can use the built in tool that comes with OpenMCDF, which is called Structured Storage Explorer. It doesn't allow you to see all the details, but allows you to see all the individual settings and their sizes. In order to see the actual settings, you need to format the bytes as UTF-16.
Reference:
https://github.com/ParticularLabs/SetStartupProjects
I created an open source dotnet global tool for this:
dotnet install --global suo
suo view <path-to-suo-file>
More information at https://github.com/drewnoakes/suo
I'd like to create a script that will configure the Visual Studio IDE the way I like it. Nothing vastly complicated, just a few Tools/Options settings, adding some External Tools, that kind of thing.
I know that this can be done inside VS with Import/Export Settings, but I'd like to be able to automate it from outside of VS. Is this possible, and if so, how?
Edited to add: doing it from outside of VS is important to me -- I'm hoping to use this as part of a more general "configure this newly-Ghosted PC just the way I like it" script.
Edited again: the solution seems to be to hack CurrentSettings.vssettings, or use AutoIt. Details below.
Answering my own question, in two ways:
In VS2005/8, the things I mentioned (Tools/Options, External Tools) are all stored in the CurrentSettings.vssettings file, in the folder "Visual Studio 200{5|8}\Settings". This file is just XML, and it can be edited programmatically by anything that knows how to parse XML. You can also just paste a new vssettings file over the top of the default one (at least, this works for me).
The larger question of configuring a virgin PC. It turns out that not everything I want to change has an API, so I need some way of pretending to be a user who is actually sitting there clicking on things. The best approach to this seems to be AutoIt, whose scripting language I will now have to learn in my Copious Free Time.
An easy way is to use the macro recorder to do something simple, then look at the code it produces and edit it as you see fit.
On my machine Visual Studio stores it's local settings in a file called VCComponents.dat. Its a text file, so perhaps you could find a way of placing your settings directly in there.
The file is stored in my users local AppData\Local\Microsoft\VC folder