dotnet thoughts » Miscellaneous

How to create your own custom Accelerator for Internet Explorer

Anuraj P — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 03:07:49 +0000

The Accelerator feature of the IE helps to quickly perform everyday browsing tasks without leaving the website. Simply highlight the text, click on the blue Accelerator icon that appears above your selection, it will popup the different Accelerator options. For example, with the “Map with Bing” Accelerator in Internet Explorer, you can get an in-place view of a map displayed directly on the page.

In this example, I am creating an Accelerator for searching StackOverflow.com. The Accelerator is simply an XML file, you can find more details about this XML specification here

Here is the implementation



http://www.stackoverflow.com/

	Search with Stackoverflow
	http://sstatic.net/stackoverflow/img/favicon.ico
    Search with Stackoverflow

Also you require a HTML file to install the Accelerator to IE. It will use window.external.AddService method. Here is the HTML file.




    Add SO Search Accelerator

Pressing on the button will popup, an Add Accelerator dialog, click on Add button, which will add the accelerator to your browser.

Add Accelerator Dialog

And here is the Accelerator in action.

Accelerator in Action

Happy Coding

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How to write an NUnit Addin

Anuraj P — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 04:51:09 +0000

From version 2.2.x NUnit supports AddIns. Addins can customize NUnit’s internal behavior such as the creation of tests and their execution. An Addin should to implement the interface NUnit.Core.Extensibility.IAddin, which can be found in the assembly nunit.core.interfaces. Also the NUnit.Core.Extensibility.NUnitAddinAttribute must be applied to Addin class. The attribute parameters Name and Description represent the name of the extension and a description of what it does. The NUnit.Core.Extensibility.IAddin has only one method, Install(). The Install method is called by each host for which the addin has specified an ExtensionType. The addin should check that the necessary extension points are available and install itself, returning true for success or false for failure to install. The method will be called once for each extension host and – for Core extensions – each time a new test domain is loaded. Here is a minimal addin.

namespace SampleAddIn
{
    using NUnit.Core.Extensibility;

    [NUnitAddin(Name = "SampleAddIn", Description = "This is a Sample AddIn")]
    public class SampleNUnitAddin : IAddin
    {
        #region IAddin Members

        public bool Install(IExtensionHost host)
        {
            return true;
        }

        #endregion
    }
}

You can install the Addin, by copying the assembly to bin\Addins folder, relative to NUnit installation directory. You can verify your addin by starting NUnit, Tools > Addins menu.

Registered AddIns Dialog

This Addin does nothing. It simply registers itself to NUnit. You can more details about NUnit Addins here
If you are using VS2010, then please make sure your target framework is .Net 2.0. Otherwise Addin won’t work.

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Cloak option missing from source control explorer context menu

Anuraj P — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 05:57:34 +0000

Ever noticed some time cloak menu item missing from source control explorer context menu?

: Cloak option is missing from source control explorer context menu

Cloaking used to prevent users from viewing specified workspace folders or for folders you do not currently need. Cloaking is useful when you are working with files from two or more branches under a common parent to prevent you from copying files unnecessarily. Finally, cloaking increases performance bandwidth and conserves local disk space by preventing folders and files not used currently from being copied to the local working folder. Today I noticed that I am missing the cloak option for a specific folder. I couldn’t find the reason, because it available for another Folder in same workspace. Later I found that it was because of the mapping of local and source folder are different. Like my TFS path was $Projects/System/Data/Binaries, it should be mapped to C:\Projects\System\Data\Binaries, but I was mapped to some other folder like C:\Projects\System\Data\DataBinaries. And then I changed it via File > Source Control > Workspaces option. After this I got the cloak option.

Cloak option of Source control explorer conext menu

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PSR – Problem Step Recorder – Free Windows Screen Recording tool

Anuraj P — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 03:10:18 +0000

Problem Step Recorder is a handy utility from Microsoft helps to automatically capture the steps you take on a computer, including a text description of where you clicked and a picture of the screen during each click (called a screen shot). Once you capture these steps, you can save them to a file that can be used by a support professional or someone else helping you with a computer problem. Click here for Problem Steps Recorder Overview. You can launch psr from Start Menu > Run and type psr.

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MSTest.exe does not deploy all items

Anuraj P — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 17:32:29 +0000

MS Test running command line

Today while working on some regression build issues, me and my lead noticed one problem with MS Tests, we are running MSTest.exe from commandline to execute few tests. The problem was MSTest.exe was is not copying all the referenced assemblies to the Out folder, and this is causing failures. We initially thought the issue with commandline MSTest.exe, because all these test cases were running fine, when we run same using Visual Studio IDE. All the required assemblies are referenced to the test project, because of that we didn’t tried the DeploymentItem attribute. We tried the various MSTest commandline switches, but nothing worked. Later we found the issue, it was because of the referenced assemblies was not being used in the test. The problem fixed by creating instance of the all required assemblies in the test cases.

Thanks to Raghu Happy unit testing.

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