Yesterday, Developer Express released new versions of their fantastic tools CodeRush and Refactor! Pro (I already blogged about the latter today).

I have made new versions of my two CodeRush plugins available, both compiled against the new CodeRush version 1.1.28. An important change was made to the OpenToolWindow plugin (find the original announcement for that one here), to make use of a property in the CodeRush core that's now public. So if you want to use OpenToolWindow with CodeRush >= 1.1.28, be sure to download the new version 1.0.1 of the plugin! (On the other hand, don't use this new version if you are on an older version of CodeRush!)

Electric Editing doesn't have any important changes in itself, but it has been changed in a few places where methods in the CodeRush core had been made obsolete. Get the download for the new version 1.2.3.1 from the plugin's own page.

I can't find anything about it in Google and I don't have time right now to pursue the matter, but my new Vista installation steadfastly refuses to talk to my file server, running Samba on a Linux machine. I can try to connect to the share and I'm asked for my authentication, but Vista doesn't like my username/password combination, no matter what I do. I did manage to connect to a Windows XP machine, so I guess they just killed the protocol once again...

Starting up IE 7 and navigating to Google :-), one of the first things I was wondering about was a funny whiteish blob, saying "Google", in the upper left corner. As large as the funny combined tool-/menubar, but more imposing because of the white background colour, I was wondering what that might be.

Well, now I know: it's the tabs that IE 7 supports at long last, in the rendition created by the new Aero theme. Wow, who would have thought that this feature would have that ugly a visual representation when it finally came along?

I just decided to just let it run next to some other things. Worked nicely in VMWare, I don't understand what all the people are talking about, what with the problems creating an installation partition. I just used the standard tool there was to create a new partition and format it - one minor glitch here, I had to reboot the installation between creating the partition and formatting it, because the format function would just do nothing at first.

The installation process itself is funny. It starts of with a first step, which has a nice progress bar and is quite fast anyway. Then, when you think this must have been it, the system reboots and starts doing a lot of the real stuff, apparently, which has only an activitity bar that doesn't show how far the process has actually progressed. Interesting design choice, because this second step takes, as an estimate, three or four times as long as the first.

Anyway, installation finished without further problems after about 35 minutes. Obviously the standard settings of the VMWare display driver aren't that great, I'll have to see about that now.

There's a new release available of Refactor! Pro by Developer Express and there are some awesome new refactorings in it. A lot of work has been put into the so-called preview hinting, that allows the user to see what exactly is going to happen when a specific refactoring is executed. This screenshot should tell you a lot about preview hinting (granted, in an extreme scenario):

It's probably worth repeating that parts of the Refactor! functionality are available for free for Visual Basic 2005 developers. If you didn't know that yet, have a look at this link: http://msdn.microsoft.com/vbasic/downloads/2005/tools/refactor/

And you can find the direct download of this version here.

Carl Franklin has made some videos available of an interview with Mark Miller, where most of the new refactorings are shown. Mark also explains a lot of the reasoning behind the various available refactorings. Here they are (Flash required):

Part 1 of 2: http://perseus.franklins.net/refactor3a.html

Part 2 of 2: http://perseus.franklins.net/refactor3b.html

There are also some earlier videos that you might be interested in:

http://perseus.franklins.net/refactor1.html

http://perseus.franklins.net/refactor2.html