This post is using the CSAH Visual Studio plugin.  I like it for the following reasons:

1. Includes an installer, so its brainless.
2. It has options you can set to override your current Visual Studio settings like font.
3. It appears to copy all my colors, including background colors.  WYSIWYG.
4. Best of all it has a menu option in the context menu, Copy as HTML.

Lets try it, select some code in Visual Studio, right click Copy as HTML.  ALT-TAB to Live Writer, right click select Paste Special.  Select Keep Formatting, OK.  It keeps all the formatting info inline, so it should work in RSS aggregators.

This is something so simple, but so cool.  In FireFox I just noticed that I can select a piece of text on web page and right click select View Selection Source.  Only the HTML source for the selected area will be shown, all the other noise is gone.  I just double checked and IE doesn't have anything like this.

For now obvious reasons, inserting code using an external style sheet DOES NOT work inside an RSS aggregator.  Hopefully I don't have to devolve into using Font tags as Jeff Atwood does.  Lets try the Live Writer plugin with the Embed StyleSheet option checked this time.

/// <summary>
/// Recursively gets the innermost exception, i.e. the first exception
/// that was thrown.
/// </summary>
/// <param name="ex">The exception to unwind.</param>
/// <returns>The inner most InnerException.</returns>
public static Exception GetInnerMostException(Exception ex)
{
    Exception inner = ex;
    while (inner.InnerException != null)
        inner = inner.InnerException;

    return inner;
}

By now most of us have figured out how to create sophisticated build scripts using NAnt, NAnt is the de-facto standard among .NET OSS projects and for good reason.  NAnt is the best build system on the .NET platform.  So with that out of the way, why would I be writing a series on MSBuild? 

Here's the biggest problem with NAnt as I see it, NAnt doesn't work in the de-facto .NET IDE, Visual Studio.  In Java, Ant build scripts work right there in your IDE.  As good as NAnt is, there's still the context switch cost of switching between Visual Studio and the command prompt.  Aw but I have hot keys you say.  OK, but some newbie dev on your team certainly doesn't, and in general most .NET developers are most comfortable within the realms of Visual Studio rather than the command line.  Like it or not, most .NET developers don't want to build through a command line before they can build through Visual Studio.

The other advantage MSBuild has is that csproj files work natively in the build engine.  If the C# project works in Visual Studio, then you know it will work on the command line with MSBuild.  There's no need to maintain two separate build scripts or any other silliness.  I have also found MSBuild to be really good at resolving dependant nested builds.  So without further ado, here's the rundown of posts I hope to hit in this series:

1. The basics, project structure.
2. Configuration file management.
3. Building the database.
4. Unit testing.
5. Code documentation with Doxygen.
6. Preparing your build artifacts for deployment.
7. Integrating with CruiseControl.NET.

So I tried out the Windows Live Writer code formatting plugin available on CodePlex, and at first sight it seemed to work well, that was until I read my feed through Google Reader.  For some reason within Google Reader there was a bunch of extra white space between lines of code, which as a result made it completely unreadable.  So here I am again trying out yet another Live Writer plugin, Insert Code for Windows Live Writer.  Hopefully this one works.

/// <summary>
/// Recursively gets the innermost exception, i.e. the first exception
/// that was thrown.
/// </summary>
/// <param name="ex">The exception to unwind.</param>
/// <returns>The inner most InnerException.</returns>
public static Exception GetInnerMostException(Exception ex)
{
    Exception inner = ex;
    while (inner.InnerException != null)
        inner = inner.InnerException;

    return inner;
}

I'm using the instructions from Phil Haack.

After upgrading DasBlog to the latest release and setting up FeedBurner I felt that I needed to do something to improve my posting experience.  Since inception I've been using the built-in rich text web form in DasBlog.  However good it may be it still lacks in a few areas:

1. No real-time spell checking.  Since FireFox 2.0 came out this hasn't been an issue since it includes a very nice spell checker.
2. Code formatting.  For the life of me, I cannot get code formatting to respect my tab spacing.  It parses the code just fine, but after it gets inserted into the post text area all the tabbing is gone.  This last point has really frustrated me and kept me from posting code as often.
3. No offline mode.  Yeah I know, that's a bit much to ask of a web product, although Google seems to have found away around this with their Google Gears, which allows me to use the Google Reader in offline mode.

All of these issues have led down the path to Windows Live Writer, which is what I'm using right now to write this post.  The thing that amazed me about both DasBlog and Windows Live Writer, is that installing and configuring Windows Live Writer just worked.  There was no oeed to read any instruction manual or otherwise research how to set this up.  It just worked.

The other thing that impressed me was that it has a web preview mode which allows me to actually see this post as would appear on my blog - and I mean exactly as it would appear on my blog.  It basically has a complete cache of my blog home page, even when disconnected from the inter-web, which is really nice and unexpected.  In Google terms, that feature "delighted" me.

As for code, lets see if I can cut and paste from Visual Studio...

/// <summary>
/// Converts a local DateTime instance to the MiniTix date time format.
/// </summary>
/// <remarks>
/// ISO 8601 date format in Zulu time.
/// </remarks>
/// <param name="date">The date.</param>
/// <returns></returns>
public static string ToMiniTixDateTimeFormat(DateTime date)
{
    return date.ToUniversalTime().ToString("u");
}

Darn, that didn't quite work did it?  Fortunately I noticed Windows Live Writer has a plugin feature.  Google search...  Found a code formatter plugin right away on CodePlex!  Lets see how the new plugin works.  Exception, Directory not found!  OK that didn't work, although Live Writer did find and load the plugin automatically while it was running (I unzipped the plugin to the plugins folder while Live Writer was still running), lets try restarting Live Writer and try again - Insert clipboard as code:

        /// <summary>
        /// Converts a local DateTime instance to the MiniTix date time format.
        /// </summary>
        /// <remarks>
        /// ISO 8601 date format in Zulu time.
        /// </remarks>
        /// <param name="date">The date.</param>
        /// <returns></returns>
        public static string ToMiniTixDateTimeFormat(DateTime date)
        {
            return date.ToUniversalTime().ToString("u");
        }

 Much better!  Even the XML comments got picked up.  Finally, lets see if I can post!

1. Feed speed optimization, my blog server isn't the hottest thing around - by a long shot.  In fact its on my todo list to find a new hoster.
2. Exposure, hopefully I can draw in more readers.
3. Feed analytics.  Right now I have really no idea if anyone ever reads this blog, or how often.
   
4. Everyone's doing it.
   

Well, I fixed our CC.NET build that builds one of our C++ projects.  The MSBuild script was taking longer than the timeout specified in CC.NET (which was set to 5 minutes), so CC.NET was killing the build before it finished without reporting as to why the build was failing.

USE MASTER
GO

-- If the database already exists, drop it
IF EXISTS(SELECT * FROM sysdatabases WHERE name='Northwind')
ALTER DATABASE Northwind SET SINGLE_USER WITH ROLLBACK IMMEDIATE
GO

IF EXISTS(SELECT * FROM sysdatabases WHERE name='Northwind')
    DROP DATABASE Northwind
GO

int theRef = 42;
int theOut = 0;
Expect.Call(obj.MyMethod(ref theRef, 0, out theOut)).Return(True).OutRef(13, 666)

using System;
using System.IO;
using log4net;

namespace ConsoleApplication1
{
    class Program
    {
        private static readonly ILog Logger = LogManager.GetLogger(typeof(Program));

        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            string input;
            do
            {
                input = Console.ReadLine();

                if (input != null)
                    DeleteDir(input);

            } while (input != null);
        }

        private static void DeleteDir(string input)
        {
            if (Directory.Exists(input))
            {
                Logger.InfoFormat("Deleting directory {0}", input);
                Directory.Delete(input, true);
            }
            else
                Logger.WarnFormat("Directory {0} does not exist", input);
        }
    }
}