Imagine that you want to make an extension for Visual Studio 2010 that creates new custom right click menus for the Solution Explorer. Imagine that you could do it by just implementing a good old .NET interface like this:

public class MenuManager : IMenuManager

{

public IEnumerable<IMenuItem> GetMenus(ContextLevels menuForLevel)

{

var menuItems = new List<IMenuItem>();

var menuItem1 = new MenuItem("My Menu1");

menuItems.Add(menuItem1);

var menuItem2 = new MenuItem("My Menu2");

menuItems.Add(menuItem2);

return menuItems;

}


public string MainMenu()

{

return "My Main Menu";

}

}

Well it turns out you can. In MME I have helped you do exactly that. No more using the convoluted add-in model of Visual Studio to accomplish this goal. And it is also much simpler than using GAX/GAT (that can do so much more to be fair).

You can easily install MME, either by downloading directly from Codeplex or by installing directly from the Extension Manager in Visual Studio 2010 (you can find it under the Tools menu).

MME does not work for the Express editions of VS.

I also recommend installing the MME MenuManager template which you can also find in the Extension Manager.

At codeplex you can read more about implementing and deploying MME’s and also get further insight on the architecture.

Just released version 1.2 of SolZip my convenient tool for Zipping Visual Studio 2008 solutions

The major is a single install for SolZipMME, so you won't have to install ManagedMenuExtensions beforehand.

The release notes are here:

1. Bug Fix: when multiple projects where referering to the same file it was added to the archive multiple times.
2. SolZipMME uses SaveFileDialog instead of FolderBrowserDialog for Zip files.
3. A single file installer for SolZipMME.
4. Clipboard functionality now works on Vista / Windows Server 2008.
5. SolZipGuidance changed. The menu will no longer appear on projects that are not C# projects. SolZipMME not changed.
6. Support for $(SolutionDir) and $(ProjectDir) placeholders added
7. Now works on Windows Vista even if UAC is not turned off

Enjoy...

I just released version 1.1 of SolZip which can be downloaded from the download page at the SolZip site.

The new action packed version contains one major improvement, one bug fix, and a few name changes:

1. Now Source Control bindings for TFS and SCC can be removed from sln and csproj files. The default for all 3 UI's is that the bindings are removed, but you can optionally choose not to remove them. Feel free to contact me if you need bindings from other source control vendors removed.
2. A bug fixed that made WinZip clients give a warning when unzipping certain archives made by SolZip. The warning was given when there was .. (2 dots) in a path in one of the zipped files.
3. The Name SunZip.exe for the commandline tool was changed to SolZip.exe. Because SunZip sounded too much like UnZip.
4. The Name SolutionZipper changed to SolZip everywhere. Except for SolutionZipper.dll which has been changed to SolZipBasis.dll

In the next version I will try to include ManagedMenuExtensions in the install so you won't have to run more than one setup to install SolZipMME.

Enjoy the new version :O)

I just released a new codeplex project SolutionZipper which makes it a breeze to zip compress your visual studio solutions and projects. "What's wrong with WinZip you might Ask". Well WinZip has no knowledge of Visual Studio Solutions, which means it will compress everything in the folder, including bin / obj folders and other random debris.

I accomplish the compression by using the following algorithm:

1. Iterate over all items and projects in the sln file and zip each of these.
2. Zip the sln file itself.
3. Iterate over all items in the csproj files and zip each of these. The iteration is done using Linq to Xml of course.
4. Zip the csproj file itself.

As you might have guessed SolutionZipper only works for C# projects, and is only tested with VS2008.

I offer three UI's for SolutionZipper

SunZip - A commandline tool.

SolZipMME - Providing Right click menus for Visual Studio 2008 using Managed Menu Extensions .

SolZipGuidance - Providing Right click menus for Visual Studio 2008 using Guidance Automation (GAX).

For the actual zipping I use the excellent open source framework SharpZipLib.

My favourite RSS reader is GreatNews. First of all it is a standalone application, and secondly it is portable, which means I can install it on a USB key or better yet in my Dropbox which is what I do.

Well to be fair it is not portable in the purist way because it caches some stuff on the computers harddrive, but that is only for performance, so functionally GreatNews IS portable.

And GreatNews is very fast, which is just one more reason to love it.

In fact it has only one drawback, the database tends to get corrupt every 2-3 months, and there is no obvious way to repair it. I guess it will be corrected at some point in time (?) but for now it nearly made me give up on this otherwise great product.

After some googling I found that GreatNews uses an sqlite database called newsfeed.db. I couldn't really find a repair tool for it, even though I found a page which lots of tools for sqlite.

So I had to repair it in a more indirect way.

I downloaded one called sqliteman and with this I was able to make a new database called newsfeed.db and export all content from the old database and import it to the new one.

One nice sideeffect was that the database was only 1/10 in size after the import. Apparently either GreatNews or Sqllite tends to bloat the database.

After the import I replaced the old database with the new one (you should make a backup of course !), and viola it worked perfectly. So once more I am a happy user of GreatNews :O).

I cannot guarantee that this method will work for you too, perhaps I was just lucky. I advice you to keep your backup of the old newsfeed.db just in case.

P.S: To export the database you just choose "Dump database..." as shown below in a screenshot from sqliteman, which generates an SQL script that can be opened and run in the new database: