A while back I talked about the new feature available in MSBuild 4 Inline Tasks in.

• MSBuild 4.0: Inline Tasks
• MSBuild 4.0: Inline Tasks Part 2

In the previous examples I have use C# as my language of choice. C# is not your only choice you can also use VB.Net but you can also use JavaScript! When MSBuild creates the class for the inline task it uses CodeDom to do so, and JavaScript is one of its supported languages. Perhaps its actually called JScript. In any case take a look at the project file below which shows this in action.

Here you can see that I created a new inline task called, Jsex01 and its written in Javascript. Then inside of the PrintValues target this task is called. If you execute the PrintValues target the result will be what you see below.

So if you prefer JavaScript to C# or VB.Net then you should try this out!

Sayed Ibrahim Hashimi

Do you have a great idea for the next version of Visual Studio and you want to get your voice heard? Now is your chance! Go to twitter and post a message stating your request with the hash tag #vswish and we will take a look at it. We are listening to that channel so please do submit your feedback.

Sayed Ibrahim Hashimi

I’m happy to say that I was offered, and accepted, a position on the Web Platform and Tools team with Microsoft. I will be a Program Manager on that team. In a nutshell I will be responsible for helping to make development easier for web developers using .NET and Visual Studio. Its a very interesting role and I’m gonna be pretty challenged in the next few months to adapt to my new role. The Web Platform and Tools team has a bunch of tools that they are responsible for, and one of the is the Web Deployment Tool. I think that this will be one of the areas that I will be working in, so if you have any ideas feel free to drop me a line here or privately at sayed –DOT—hashimi [AT] gmail –DOT—com. I will start in this role in about 2 weeks.

Sayed Ibrahim Hashimi

Have you ever executed a .cmd file (or .bat) file and received a message that looks like the following at the top of your script (including image for compatibility)  ? This was really annoying to me until I find out what was happening. I noticed that Visual Studio (2010 at least, but I think previous version as well but not sure) was changing the encoding of my .cmd files to be UTF-8! For example consider this simple script (sample.cmd) that I created with Notepad.

echo 'hello world'

When I execute this .cmd file from the command line the results are as shown below.

What I did then was to simply create a copy of that file and placed that in a file named sample-vs.cmd and then edited the script using Visual Studio 2010 to have the contents below.

echo 'hello world from Visual Studio'

When I execute that .cmd file to my surprise the results shown below are displayed.

I was definitely not expecting that (OK yeah I was because I created that script for this blog post, but just go with it). I then opened the file in notepad and it looked normal. So I edited it it notpad, saved it and the result was still the same. The first line was not being processed correctly, it seemed. As I was editing the file I noticed the encoding of the files were different. The encoding for the sample.cmd file was set to ANSI and for sample-vs.cmd UTF-8. See for yourself from the screen shots below.

So I switched the setting for the sample-vs.cmd file to ANSI, executed the script and all was good!

I’m not sure why Visual Studio is changing the encoding for these files, but it looks like a bug to me. I have logged a bug with Microsoft at https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/566322/vs-2010-changs-encoding-of-cmd-file-to-utf-8. The bug may not be visible yet, but hopefully it will become public so that you can vote on it if you have been bitten by this bug.

Sayed Ibrahim Hashimi

If you are doing any kind of web development and you are not familiar with the Web Platform Installer(WPI) then you need to take a look at it. I just installed WordPress on IIS 7 with just a few clicks and  filled in a few text boxes. When you install WordPress there are some prerequisites like mySql and php. The WPI was smart enough to realize that I had neither installed, downloaded those, installed them and configured them. I was prompted for some info for those tools of course. I’ve also installed a few other apps using the WPI like, MSDeploy and dasBlog and I didn’t have any issues what so ever.

When using the WPI there are two main categories that can be installed, Web Platform and Web Applications. The Web Platform category includes items like frameworks (i.e. ASP.NET, PHP), Database (i.e. mySql) and other high level shared components. The Web Applications includes various web applications. Some others that I didn’t list previously include; DotNetNuke, nopCommerce, and umbarco just to name a few. I’m not sure how many apps are available but it looks like at least 50.

If you are an app creator and would like to share your app then you can visit the WPI Developer page for a starting point.