A few months ago Scott Hanselman bring to all community fellows a new Visual Studio add-in called RockScroll.

RockScroll was an internal tool from Microsoft but Scott convinced Microsoft to allow him to make it available to community as a "Works on my machine" tool. This means that RockScroll is released with exactly zero warranty or support.

But what does this tool anyway? Simply replace the default vertical scrollbar  with an improved one where the background is the thumbnail of the current code file.

Well, better take a look.

As you can see this add-in let you know where you are editing in a more accurate way and, beside this, you can also easily locate comment lines, breakpoints and changed lines.

The only point I dislike is related to regions. Since the thumbnail is generated based on the file content, if you have collapsed regions you will find difficult to scroll exactly where you want.

You can use it in both in Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008. The Visual Studio 2010 will be shipped with a similar scrollbar(probably an improved version of RockScroll).

I've been using it in VS 2005 since was made available and I can say I didn't notice any related problem or performance hit.

You can get it here. Go try it now.

I made this post draft in September and forgot to publish it. Since then I redirect all colleagues and friends that notice I was using this add-in to this blog. Only a few days ago I notice the post wasn't there so, to them, my apologies.

Yesterday, I decided to spent some time reviewing the WindowsLiveWriter plugin gallery and search for a replacer for Steve Dunn CodeFormatter plugin. I've been using this plugin since the beginning of the year but it reveal some problems composing the Html.

My friend Paulo told me about Douglas Stockwell "Paste from Visual Studio" plugin and I decided to try this one.

I download the vspaste.msi and tried to install it without success. As far as I understood (I didn't take this to depth) the .MSI was looking for a specific registry entry and since I'm using the portable version of WLW the key wasn't found.

I knew that WLW plugins don't required any special install procedure, they just need to be in the plugins folder.

I decided then to extract the .MSI content in order to be able to copy the assembly to the correct folder in my flash drive.

Searching the web I found a little tool called "Less MSIèrables" that exactly feets my needs.

It's a free tool written in C# for .NET 1.1 that allow us to open an .MSI file, explore its contents, and extract selected items.

We can also run it from the command line.

Its not perfect and I found a few possible improvements:

• GUI - adding Drag'n'Drop capability
• GUI - adding a select/unselect all files checkbox
• CPI - adding a -l option to list all files within a .MSI file
• CPI - adding a -e option to extract a list of files

The good news is that author made the source code available, so anyone can extend the tool.

In conclusion, it's free, it's cool and I think I going use it many times in future, helping me to see if I really need to install a .MSI.

For those of you that prefer not to use free tools, Microsoft provides us with msiexec.exe tool. This one is available in Windows XP and higher and also allow us to extract .MSI files using the following syntax:

msiexec.exe /a vspaste.msi /qb TARGETDIR=c:\temp

Two weeks ago, Paulo posted about "The Architecture Tool Space Keeps Growing". On this post, Paulo talked about new tools and the continuous improvements in the existing ones.

Well, more recently I read this Scott Hanselman post. Here, Scott talk, apart several other things, about tools for doing Assembly Differences and between them there are new one called BitDiffer.

In the Scott tests, this tool crashed :(

Today, I took some time and install the BitDiffer version 1.3.0.11 so I can explore a little.

Here are my thoughts:

Advantages

• Simple but yet complete UI
• Fast - it took only a 3-5 seconds to compare two versions.
• Includes a Command Line version

Disadvantages

• Exports only to HTML / XML format
• Drag-And-Drop still not working
• It's not free

Final note

BitDiffer is very similar to Framework Design Studio in functionality but when coming to usability I think it's more intuitive (even without the Drag-And-Drop).

If Gref Ennis add support for Drag-And-Drop and side-by-side comparing code changes, then I will definitely consider to buy it.