VISUG Belgium

The Visual Studio User Group Belgium (VISUG) is born! The first official meeting took place last Wednesday (January 25, 2006).

• Goal VISUG
  The overall goal of the VISUG is to provide the Visual Studio .NET community in Belgium with the necessary infrastructure and organization to enable a community meeting point for everybody who is interested in Microsoft's Visual Studio .NET technology. VISUG targets everybody interested in Visual Studio .NET products and technologies. This involves developers, infrastructure people, administrators, architects, managers, sales people and possibly also power-users.
• VISUG Meetings
  VISUG will monthly organize 10 meetings open to all VISUG members. Twice a year, a public event will be organized. VISUG will also be present at all major local Microsoft events.

More info about the VISUG will be published soon on the VISUG website. Contact our president Steven Wilssens or our vice-president Peter Himschoot for more information.

Paris-Dakar 2006

Tomorrow we're leaving for Dakar (Senegal) to experience the finish of the rally Paris-Dakar. My girlfriend has won this journey because of her curiosity. One evening she noticed a publicity panel on her way home and was attracted by a pink dog and a link to this website. Back home she surfed to the website and answered some questions. A few weeks later, a representative of Mitsubishi Belgium called her to ask her if she was prepared to travel to Dakar. She was apparently the lucky winner of the game and she could take someone (me!!) with her. Really amazing! Curiosity of women can also be good for men ...

Thank you very much Mitsubishi.

External Tools

Did you know you can add items to the Tools menu in the Visual Studio IDE (2003 and 2005) to launch external tools from within Visual Studio? There are numerous possibilities :

• Opening an assembly in .NET Reflector
• Opening an assembly in ILDasm
• Generating a new key pair (strong name)
• Adding an asembly to the Global Assembly Cache
• Removing an assembly to the Global Assembly Cache
• ...

Two Examples :

• Adding an assembly to the Global Assembly Cache
  
  • Go to Tools > External Tools ...
  • Add Item - choose title, command, arguments and check use output window. Gacutil.exe can be found at C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003\SDK\v1.1\Bin\gacutil.exe. The argument for adding an assembly to GAC is /i, followed by the assembly path. For the assembly path, you can use the macro $(TargetPath).
    
    
  • You're now ready to use the command in the Tools menu. Be sure that your assembly has already a strong name before adding it to the GAC. Output of the action will be sent to the output window.
  
  
• Removing an assembly from the Global Assembly Cache
  
  • Go to Tools > External Tools ...
  • Add Item - choose title, command, arguments and check use output window. Gacutil.exe can be found at C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003\SDK\v1.1\Bin\gacutil.exe. The argument for remving an assembly from the GAC is /u, followed by the assembly name. For the assembly name, you can use the macro $(TargetName).
    
    
  • You're now ready to use the command in the Tools menu. Output of the action will be sent to the output window.