Kyle's life in technology

Sunday, December 11, 2005

VS.NET 2005, you had me at hello

Decided to take the plunge & install it.  So I freed up some space, prepping to lose a nice chunk (4GB) to the IDE & help files.  (Note going into this, I already had the .NET 2.0 Framework Redistributable installed.)  I have VS.NET 2003 & help installed and no plans on removing it.

  • First thing -- VS.NET 2005 picked up on the fact I have Win XP SP1 and told me I have to have SP2.  Fair enough.  (time passes ...)
  • While I wait, I'm reading articles like this that concern me (but I will most likely never run into this particular one).  But I still want it.  Folding laundry now waiting for my 111mb download & install of SP2 to finish.
  • Allset ... install + docs with my documentation only took 2.1GB --  not bad
  • Installed AnkhSVN snapshot 23  [would recommend firing up VS.NET 2005 at least once before installing all the add-ins]
  • Installed NUnit 2.2.3 (support for .NET 2.0 )
  • Installed TestDriven.NET 2.0 beta
  • Loaded my first project ...
It did an automatic conversion/upgrade of the project for me.  All I had to do to get it to run was to change the reference to the key file (.snk) for signing the assembly.  VS.NET 2005 wants it as a project option, whereas in 2003 it was an assembly-level attribute.  Easy enough fix.  Presto -- one of my more critical projects compiled without a hitch, and all 200+ unit tests passed like a champ.  nice :)

Played around with Refactoring a bit -- this could come in handy.  Class designer was good too -- dropped a solution on the surface and it diagrammed out a class model diagram for all of the classes.

All in all -- very nice.  Excited to explore more features, like the local web projects improvements.

Saturday, December 03, 2005

Mono running on Suse 9.1, FC4

Finally finished with the Mono on Suse 9.1 madness.  Not sure why I spent so much time on it, other than it became an obsession/challenge.  I learned a ton on the way.

I installed Fedora Core 4 on a different box using VMWare.  (Learned you can mount ISO's from host OS to look like the CD drive to the guest OS, pretty slick).  I did the same thing (built from source distribution), but took only 1-2 evenings.  All of the packages in FC4 were considerably more up to date.

I am very excited about Mono on Linux.  I was able to successfully run MonoDevelop on both Suse 9.1 and FC4.  It didn't run too bad on an old PII-350, runs very nicely on a newer PentiumM.