The source for WPingF is up on GitHub now.  Here's the link: http://wiki.github.com/codereflection/WPingF

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 and Windows 7 are required.  Visifire is distributed with the source for graphing capabilities.

If you would prefer just the binaries, they are available under Downloads on GitHub: http://github.com/codereflection/WPingF/downloads

Enjoy.

Scott Hanselman (@shanselman) had a tweet today about an open source virtual router for WiFi sharing (http://virtualrouter.codeplex.com/) (via @crpietschmann). This reminded that before I upgraded to Win 7, I found that my Lenovo W500 (best laptop ever) had support in Vista for creating a personal WiFi network using the Intel adapter.  I dug a little deeper to see if this also works in Win 7.

The latest version of the Intel WiFi drivers (v13) do include support for Intel's My WiFi technology, which allows you to turn your laptop into a wireless router, allowing up to 8 computers to connect, while maintaining your wireless connection to the Internet. (BTW ' I downloaded the Intel 5150 drivers first, without realizing that I have the 5300, to find that the 5150 does not support this feature).

To do this, your W500 has to have either the Intel 5300, 5100, or 1000 WiFi adapter.

You'll have to download the large driver package from Lenovo (around 78 meg), and choose the custom install, because My WiFi support is not installed by default:

After installation, you will find My WiFi under Intel PROSet Wireless

You then have to enable My WiFi support:

There are a few options for adding devices, some supporting WiFi Protected Setup:

Manually adding a device though show a scary security passphrase:

You can change this though by adding a new Profile:

Adding a new profile allows you to set the SSID, security settings, etc:

It'll give you a really long encryption key by default, but you can change it here:

They'll even let you set the default channel:

Options will even let to change what DHCP settings it's going to use for your connected clients:

How well does it work? I don't know yet, once some of the other laptops in the house aren't being used, I'll try it out, (BTW, none of these settings are for my actual setup, so just incase you know where I live, this info won't help you). :)

Late last night I was copying a group of large files for an application deployment over to a server that exists on a very shaky and temperamental wireless internet connection.  My VPN connection would constantly drop, at least every 3 to 4 minutes.  A continuous ping is my friend here as it lets me know as soon as the server stops responding, but it's kind of a pain to have to resize my windows to see the command prompt all the time.

So I got to thinking about Scott Hanselman's post about apps that "Light Up" on Windows 7, and Scott's post about Jeff Key's Taskbar Meters. Wouldn't it be great to have a simple ping utility that would let me see the response time and timeouts via the Windows 7 taskbar?  Of course it would.

After 30 minutes or so (I know, but I had to get a drink of water), I had this little app thrown together, and so I have named it WPingF:

And of course the entire purpose of this is the taskbar status:

The indicator is the roundtrip time / the specified timeout, and it will turn red when there's a response timeout.

It's not much to look at right now, but it works.  I'm going to add a couple more features to it (such as saving the host names in the drop down in a local xml for thumb drive deployment), and stick the code out there for anyone who cares to abuse it.

(BTW - the WPF designer in VS 2010 is quite nice.  So much better than having to switch over to Blend or do everything in angle brackets)

A new debugger feature in Visual Studio 2010 that I really love is pinning debugger views (basically a watch in a floating window) of variables:

So when you break into the code again, you won't have to hover back over the interesting variable, you just need to look at the pinned item.

You can even set a comment on the pinned watch:

This allows you to pin multiple variables as well, from basically anything you could normally see in in debug view (as far as I can tell):

UPDATE: This issue is now resolved in TestDriven.NET 3.0.2556 (http://testdriven.net/download.aspx). Thanks to Jaime Cansdale (@jcansdale) for fixing this issue so quickly.

When you try to run TestDriven.NET 3 in Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 with xUnit.net, you might get the following exception:

------ Test started: Assembly: Mylibrary.Tests.dll ------

=== ERROR IN TEST RUNNER: xUnit.net 1.5 build 1479 ===
System.IO.FileLoadException: Could not load file or assembly 'file:///c:\users\jeff\documents\visual studio 2010\Projects\MyLibrary\Mylibrary.Tests\3rdParty\xunit\xunit.runner.tdnet.dll' or one of its dependencies. Operation is not supported. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80131515)
File name: 'file:///c:\users\jeff\documents\visual studio 2010\Projects\MyLibrary\Mylibrary.Tests\3rdParty\xunit\xunit.runner.tdnet.dll' ---> System.NotSupportedException: An attempt was made to load an assembly from a network location which would have caused the assembly to be sandboxed in previous versions of the .NET Framework. This release of the .NET Framework does not enable CAS policy by default, so this load may be dangerous. If this load is not intended to sandbox the assembly, please enable the loadFromRemoteSources switch. See http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=155569 for more information.

=================================================
It looks like you're trying to execute an xUnit.net unit test.

For xUnit 1.5 or above (recommended):
Please ensure that the directory containing your 'xunit.dll' reference also contains xUnit's
test runner files ('xunit.dll.tdnet', 'xunit.runner.tdnet.dll' etc.)

For earlier versions:
You need to install support for TestDriven.Net using xUnit's 'xunit.installer.exe' application.

You can find xUnit.net downloads and support here:
http://www.codeplex.com/xunit

To clear this issue up, you'll need to unblock the xunit reference dll's in the folder from which you're referenced them:

(do this for xunit.dll, xunit.dll.tdnet, and xunit.runner.tdnet.dll)

Afterwards, you'll be able to successfully use TD.net again without this error. (I did not have the same issue with NUnit 2.4 however)