June 2007 - Posts

• XML documentation in the C# source code

  In order to fully take advantage of the XML source code comments available in C#, you need to use all the features offered by the XML comment system.For this, the best guide I’ve found so far is this: XML Comments Let You Build Documentation Directly From Your Visual Studio .NET Source Files . Also, in order to extract the XML comments that work as and input to the Sandcastle tools, follow these steps: Inside the Visual Studio 2005 Solution Explorer, right click on your C# project Select Properties from the popup menu Select Build Make sure the checkbox XML documentation file is selected. Enter the path and file name where you want the XML file to be generated. With that setting, the next time you build your application the XML file will be generated for you. Posted Jun 29 2007, 01:04 AM by Jaguilar with no comments Filed under: Tools

• WDS Image Capture Wizard disappearing drive letter mystery solved

  Some time ago we had some issues with the WDS Image Capture Wizard that WDS inserts into WinPE to create capture images . When we got to the screen where you select the drive letter you want, the WDS Image Capture Wizard didn't list the drives, not even the C: drive. We could get to it using the command prompt, though, so we created those test images by running imagex manually. Well, it turns out that we were just documenting the processes at the time, with a full OS install on the hard disk. In what could be described as a RTFM moment, we finally figured out what was wrong – the WDS Image Capture Wizard only lists Sysprep’d drives. Once we ran Sysprep on the OS installation, everything worked smoothly with the Capture Wizard. The moral of the story is that sometimes it pays to read the manual (and follow the instructions) before jumping head-first into a project.     Posted Jun 28 2007, 06:19 PM by Jaguilar with 2 comment(s) Filed under: Tools

• Playing with Sandcastle

  Some time back I blogged about the Sandcastle project over at Microsoft, a tool that allows you to generate MSDN-style documentation from the comments in the .NET code (among other things). I recently downloaded the Sandcastle - June 2007 Community Technology Preview (CTP) to generate some documentation for a project we did with the HPC team at Microsoft. Even though it is still a CTP, it works great – right now I am able to add comments to the code and then generate sufficient documentation semi-automatically, killing two birds with one stone. If you are interested in using this tools, make sure to check out post Creating a Chm build using Sandcastle at the Sandcastle blog . Remember that Sandcastle will extract and transform the comments from your files, but you still need the HTML Help Workshop to create the actual *.chm file. Posted Jun 28 2007, 05:44 PM by Jaguilar with no comments Filed under: Tools

• Virtualization news

  This has been a very exiting week for virtualization, at least on the Microsoft side of things. Microsoft made two significant anouncements between Monday and today: First of, Virtual Server R2 2005 SP1 was finally released! You can download it from Virtual Server’s website. Make sure you check out the details about the release as well. BTW,  the website also got a new “modern” look. Nice job! Also, today Microsoft released the whitepaper “Licensing Microsoft Server Products with Microsoft Virtual Server and Other Virtual Machine Technologies”. This whitepaper details the licensing requirements to run Microsoft’s products in Virtual Server, VMWare, and other virtualization solutions. It also covers some restrictions for scenarios like moving virtual machines from one server to another, virtual machine libraries, products licensed by CPU/Virtual CPU, and others. For the licensing, remember that you can also use Windows Server Virtualization Calculators to figure out the licensing cost of running Microsoft’s server products on a virtual environment. Posted Jun 13 2007, 08:52 PM by Jaguilar with no comments Filed under: Virtualization