New Stuff
Resources for Your Developer Toolbox
Marnie Hutcheson
Contents
Cut Down Your Software Build Time
Visual Build Professional 5.6 by Kinook Software is a management solution for developers writing programs for Microsoft® Windows® and the Web that lets you create an automated, repeatable process for building your software. Visual Build Pro creates a permanent build record of XML project files and log files that become part of your project's source code (and can be maintained in source control), to provide a persistent, documented record of how builds are performed.
New features include full support for building Microsoft Visual Studio® 2005 projects and solutions with MSBuild (without installing Visual Studio on the build box), custom actions for Subversion version control and code signing of executables, support for Borland Delphi 2005 and JBuilder 2005, enhancements to the FTP, Replace in File, and Zip actions.
Visual Build Professional 5.6 runs on Windows NT® 4.0, Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Server™ 2003.
Price: $295 for a single-user license.
Generate Sequence Diagrams
EventStudio 2.5 by EventHelix.com is a sequence diagram-based system design and architecture modeling tool for the Windows platform. EventStudio 2.5 supports generation of message sequence charts and call flow diagrams used in telecom and embedded system development. It also produces process workflow diagrams for business process reengineering applications.
EventStudio 2.5 has been designed to handle diagram generation for systems with a large number of interacting objects. Objects in the system can be classified into groups and subgroups. This classification is used to generate diagrams that focus on a particular aspect of the system, enabling better understanding of a complicated system.
Some of the supported document types are: interface documents that focus on the interactions involving an object or an object-group, a diagram focusing only on the intergroup interfaces and a document that only lists messages that match a specified regular expression.
EventStudio lets you model a system by describing the interactions in the system using a simple declarative modeling language. EventStudio then analyzes the model for design errors, inconsistent operations, resource leaks, and invalid timer operations. Once the design issues have been addressed, EventStudio automatically generates sequence diagrams and collaboration diagrams.
EventStudio automatically handles diagram layout, formatting, scaling, and page breaks for sequence diagrams and collaboration diagrams. The documents are generated in the Adobe PDF and Microsoft Word Picture formats. Therefore, you can explore any number of success and failure scenarios and focus on system architecture and design, without getting bogged down by document layout issues.
EventStudio 2.5 runs under Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000, and Windows XP.
Price: $99 for a single-user license.
Convert Visual Basic to C#
C-Sharpener For Visual Basic by Elegance Technologies Inc. typically converts greater than 99 percent of your Microsoft Visual Basic® .NET projects to C# accurately and reliably. It converts Windows-based applications, class libraries, Windows control libraries, ASP.NET Web applications, Web control libraries, console applications, and Windows services.
C-Sharpener For Visual Basic is a full parser that emits C# instead of Microsoft intermediate language. It does full syntactic and semantic analysis, including a full symbol tree of all symbols in the code and referenced assemblies, to ensure accuracy in the converted code and to minimize conversion problems.
It is a Visual Studio .NET add-in so selecting the C-Sharpener For Visual Basic menu option opens the conversion wizard. A command-line interface lets you easily convert multiple projects and you can use this feature as part of an automated build process.
As with any conversion, there will be issues that the tool can't resolve by itself. The conversion report window shows the number of translation errors and warnings encountered. These issues have to be resolved before you can compile successfully, but tracking them down is easy; you just search your project for the "TRANSERROR" and the "TRANSWARNING" comments inserted during translation.
C-Sharpener For Visual Basic also has a Quick-Resolver feature that gives users the option to automatically send problem descriptions, intermediate files, log files, or entire projects to the company's support group for help with the conversion process.
Price: $99 for a single-user license.
The Installer That Can Do It All
Ghost Installer Studio 4.1 by Ethalone Solutions Inc. is a complete installation solution that creates installation CDs and Web-based distribution packages. The advanced Web deployment options let the user decide which components to install, so they can reduce the time required for download and installation.
You can create the installation package for your Visual Studio .NET 2003, Borland Delphi, JBuilder, and C++Builder projects with as few as five mouse clicks, or you can customize it using the built-in XML-based scripting and conditional processing options. There is a built-in scripter plug-in that lets you insert scripts written in VBScript, JavaScript, C++, and Object Pascal.
Ghost Installer Studio 4.1 provides RSA encryption and personalized installation key options to protect your application from piracy. It offers skinning and customization options so you can create just the branded installation you want. Ghost Installer Studio 4.1 will install the .NET Framework onto the user's computer and it can perform supplemental actions for your assemblies, such as registering for COM interop, creating COM+ applications, and installing assemblies into the Global Assembly Cache.
Price: $299 for a single-user license.
Quick Autorun App Builder for CDs
Sometimes you don't want to install a program, you just want to distribute something. If all you want is to have the user put the CD in the drive and "autorun" into your launch screen menu, instructions, or site map, without a big time investment on your part, then Visual Autorun by Digitope might be a solution for you.
Visual Autorun lets you create interactive, multimedia, autorun interfaces for your CD in just a few mouse clicks with no programming required. You add the programs you want to have on your CD to the Visual Autorun Project folder, create your autorun interface, and when you are ready, Visual Autorun burns the entire image to your CD.
You can create menus with captions, sounds, music, buttons, and splash screens, and you can link your buttons to documents or programs on the CD. The program gives you a variety of configurable options. For example, if you are distributing a document that requires a viewer application, such as a PDF, Visual Autorun can check to see if the viewer is installed and then install it if necessary.
Visual Autorun runs under Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows Me, and Windows XP.
Price: $25 for a single-user license.
Add Flash Charts to Your Web Project
AnyChart 2.0 by Anychart is a Macromedia Flash charting component that lets you add static or dynamic Flash-based charts to your Web pages, without having to modify any Flash source.
AnyChart 2.0 gives you a Flash charting component and a set of industry-standard XML configuration files. Set up your chart with the XML configuration tool that comes with Anychart, or use your favorite XML editor.
There are a variety of animated, hint-enabled 2D and 3D pie, bar, column, candlestick, and donut charts available. The XML configuration files let you control transparency, color, URL linking, captions, legends, backgrounds, animations, and sound along with the data that is displayed.
Price: $79 for a single-user license.
Keep Your Site Safe from Automated Tools
Here is an inexpensive solution for keeping bots from harvesting your e-mail addresses, running amuck in your registration-required pages, and skewing your survey results.
Lanap BotDetect Web Control by Lanap Software is a server-side control that generates images with textual code rendered as part of the image, so people can read it, but automated tools can't. When you set the image on a form and have the user key in the embedded characters, the server-side control validates the input they have entered.
Drop the control onto a Web Form, write a few lines of code to get it started, and the control will do the rest by itself. The help file has lots of step-by-step information and samples are available on the Web site.
Price: $79 for a single-user license.
The Bookshelf
Programmer's Ultimate Security DeskRef by James C. Foster (Syngress) is a comprehensive guide to security flaws in code writing in the most popular programming languages, including C++, C#, Visual Basic for Applications, VBScript, ColdFusion, JavaScript, and JScript®.
Each function or method documented is followed by a series of subjects created to help describe each function's purpose, risk, origin, resources, and so on. The description provides a detailed explanation of how the function should be used and when it should not be used. It also has explanations for any parameters the function or method may accept as input, in addition to providing details on any returned values.
The risk section describes any security threat posed when implementing the function or method. It recommends more secure alternatives if they exist. Topics include secure usage, bolt-on alternatives, and other types of developer-focused solutions. The impact section indicates the potential result that a poor implementation of the function might have on the application.
The additional resources section covers the programmatic particulars of the language, function, or method. There is also a list of cross references to similar functions and methods that are available for use in the language. For example, the C language printf may have cross references of sprintf and snprintf.
Price: $49.95, 608 pages.
All prices were confirmed at press time and are subject to change.
Send your New Stuff to newstuff@microsoft.com.
Marnie Hutcheson is president of Internet Development Associates (Ideva), a firm in Ocala, Florida, that specializes in Internet and intranet Web application design and development. She has published technical papers and books on various computing topics. You can reach her at
marnie@ideva.com.