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The Riverblade Developer's Blog

Beth demonstrating Visual Lint at the ACCU Conference 2008  Anna taking part in a discussion panel at the European Software Conference 2007 

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Archives


    August 2010


    July 2010


    June 2010


    April 2010

      Code Editor Markers in Visual Lint
      For some time now we have wanted to enhance Visual Lint to make use of the code editor customisation capabilities of Visual Studio. With Visual Lint 2.5 out there, our development branch is now focused on the next version ...

      Visual Lint for Eclipse/CDT
      For some time we have looking at producing versions of Visual Lint for non-Microsoft development environments, and as part of that effort we have been looking at the feasibility of developing a Visual Lint plug-in for the Eclipse/CDT environment ...

      ACCU Conference 2010
      Note: this topic is a work in progress, and will be expanded as I get time to write up my notes from the conference. Once again we're in Oxford for the ACCU Conference - a week of almost solid ...

      Introducing Visual TICS
      I tweeted about this a little while ago, but with the ACCU Conference nearly upon us it is about time we blogged about it. The Visual Lint codebase has been in existence for over 5 years now. Although on ...

      LintProject Pro 2.0.7.15 has been released
      The following changes are included in this build: Corrected a bug in the parsing of .vcproj project files introduced in the previous build [VS2002-VS2008]. Updated the theme of the installer to match that used in the Visual Lint installer. Minor ...

      LintProject Pro 2.0.6.14 has been released
      The following changes are included in this build: Trailing backslashes on intermediate folder paths are now filtered out before generating the PC-lint command line. This is necessary as PC-lint will raise an erroneous warning 686 and abort analysis when presented ...


    February 2010

      Visual Lint 2.5.0.127 has been released
      This is the first public Visual Lint 2.5 build, so there is a somewhat longer changelist than usual: General Added support for Visual Studio 2010. Note that as a result of some rather nasty regressions in the Visual Studio 2010 ...


    January 2010

      Visual Lint 2.0.10.124 has been released
      The following changes are included: Corrected a bug in the project file reader which caused Visual Studio inherited property sheet (.vsprops) files referenced via relative paths of the form "\foldername\filename.ext" to be located incorrectly. Added support for the new "ShowSourceInOutput" ...

      Breaking change in IncrediBuild 3.50 RC
      Just after Christmas we discovered a breaking change in IncrediBuild 3.50 RC (released on 24th December) which affects the Visual Lint/IncrediBuild integration. As this behaviour was not present in the 3.50 beta, we unfortunately weren't aware of it until a ...


    December 2009

      All Quiet on the ResOrg Front? Not Exactly...
      When I first released ResOrg 1.2 to CodeProject back in 2001, I had no idea how useful (or otherwise) other developers would find it. All I knew was that for me it helped with a real pain point. Quite frankly, ...

      So what's happening with Visual Studio 2010 support, then?
      Last night we had an enquiry asking whether Visual Lint supports Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 (a very good question). As we last blogged about this subject back in June (see Visual Studio 2010 Support for Visual Lint and LintProject ...

      ResOrg.NET 1.6.4.4 has been released
      The changes in this build include: Added support for Unicode resource (.rc) files. Corrected the line ending for files renumbered via the ResOrg.NET Explorer toolwindow. The Symbols Display now responds to the mouse wheel. Our thanks to Hans Dietrich for ...

      Visual Lint 2.0.9.121 has been released
      The following changes are included in this build: Corrected a bug in the parsing of quoted preprocessor symbols within project files. XBox 360 project configurations are now interpreted correctly [VS2002/VS2003/VS2005/VS2008]. "Excluded from Build" properties in VC6/eVC4 project files are now ...

      LintProject Professional 2.0.5.13 has been released
      The following changes are included in this build: Added a /include switch to the command line. When used, it will analyse only those files matching the specified wildcard. Files which are "excluded from build" in the current configuration will no ...


    October 2009

      StackOverflow DevDays 2009 London
      DevDays is a new conference, and one which promises to be one to watch. When we arrived the doors hadn't yet opened and there was a crowd of people milling around outside waiting. Although there was no one there we ...


    September 2009

      Visual Lint 2.0.8.117 has been released
      The following changes are included in this build: Added a "Show files in the lnt subfolder" checkbox to the "Configure Std.lnt" page in the Configuration Wizard. This allows the user to specify whether indirect files located only in the lnt ...


    August 2009

      Introducing support for Borland/CodeGear C++ Builder in LintProject Professional
      A couple of months ago I wrote about our long term plans with for support for non-Microsoft project file formats in both Visual Lint and LintProject Professional (see Non-Microsoft Platforms, Visual Lint and LintProject Professional. At the time, we presented ...

      LintProject Professional 2.0.4.12 has been released
      The following changes are included in this build: Visual C++ 2008 project (.vcproj) files created using the "Create Project from Existing Code" wizard are now parsed correctly (such project files are created with UTF-8 encoding instead of the usual Windows-1252, ...


    July 2009


    June 2009

      Visual Lint 2.0.7.113 has been released
      The following changes are included in this version: PC-lint analysis results generated without an environment file (i.e. no env-vc*.lnt file) can now be parsed correctly.Project indirect (.lnt) files generated by previous versions of Visual Lint will now be automatically re-generated.When ...

      LintProject Professional 2.0.3.11 has been released
      When I recently blogged about support for non-Microsoft project file formats, I mentioned that we were in the process of adding support for Texas Instruments Code Composer 3.x (.pjt) projects. I am pleased to announce that this functionality is now ...

      Visual Studio 2010 Support for Visual Lint and LintProject Professional
      If you follow technical blogs you can't help but have noticed that Visual Studio 2010 has now entered beta. The new IDE is on course for release towards the end of this year (my bet is on November as that's ...

      Non-Microsoft Platforms, Visual Lint and LintProject Professional
      Integrating a plug-in product such as Visual Lint into a new development environment is a rather time consuming and difficult operation - even (unfortunately) when the new IDE is just a new version of one we already support (I'm looking ...


    May 2009

      Visual Lint for Windows 7
      Hi there, my name is Beth Mackenzie. I've been rather overdue in introducing myself to you, but I hope to rectify that now. Among other things, I'm responsible for much of our testing as well as research into possible support ...

      LintProject Professional 2.0.2.10 has been released
      The changes in this build include: PC-lint raw analysis results generated without an env-vc*.lnt environment file can now be parsed correctly. Also improved the handling of messages in the module wrap-up [from Visual Lint 2.0.6.111a]. Wildcards can now be used ...

      Visual Lint 2.0.6.111 has been released
      The following changes are included in this version: Fixed a bug in the project indirect file writer which could cause paths such as "..\..\Folder" to be incorrectly resolved.Fixed a bug in the project indirect file writer which could cause paths ...


    April 2009

      ACCU 2009: So many sessions, so little time...
      Preamble [21st April 2009] Well, we're here at the Barcelo Oxford Hotel again, and for us ACCU 2009 starts tomorrow (though the pre-conference workshops happen on the Tuesday, we haven't booked onto one this year). We are a little more ...

      The ACCU Conference is next week...and we're totally linted!
      It's hard to believe that the ACCU Conference is here again - in fact it is taking place next week at the Oxford Barcello Hotel. As ever, we'll be there (for the third year in a row, now!). This year ...

      Visual Lint/IncrediBuild case study and benchmarks
      We've just had a case study published on the Xoreax website about the integration of Visual Lint and IncrediBuild: As part of the study, we conducted a number of benchmark tests to quantify just how much of an improvement using ...


    March 2009

      Visual Lint 2.0.5.109 has been released
      The following changes are included in this version: If exception handling (/GX) is enabled in a Visual C++ project, _CPPUNWIND will now automatically be defined in generated project.lnt files.System folders such as "$Recycle.Bin" are no longer searched for the PC-lint ...

      Visual Lint 2.0.4.107 has been released
      The following changes are included in this version: Updated Platforms.xml with new platform names for Smartphone and Pocket PC SDK.When an include folder mismatch in the global std.lnt configuration file is detected, Visual Lint can now prompt, automatically update the ...

      Twittering
      I'm really not sure what to make of Twitter; I know it's supposed to be a good idea, but at heart I think I'm far more of a blogger than a twitterer. Nevertheless, I'm giving it a go anyway! Please ...


    February 2009

      LintProject Professional 2.0.1.8 has been released
      The changes in this version include: Corrected the installer properties text. Corrected the product name displayed in the ReadMe and Licence files. Added the "mark of the web" to HTML reports to avoid the "active content warning from the browser ...

      PC-lint 101: What does "previously used .lnt file" mean?
      A .lnt file is an "indirect file", which is simply a collection of PC-lint directives. Indirect files can be nested, and are expanded in the order they are encountered by PC-lint. However, if PC-lint encounters the same .lnt file twice ...

      Visual Lint 2.0.3.105 has been released
      The changes in this version include: Removed a duplicated status message from the "Visual Lint Status" pane when a manual analysis operation is performed. The name of the active configuration is now cached, removing the need for repeated calls into ...


    January 2009

      LintProject Professional has been released
      Since it was first publicly released in 2004, our command line code analysis tool LintProject has gathered a significant amount of interest from Visual C++ developers. However, although the code has been significantly revised since then LintProject is now showing ...

      PC-Lint 101: What does "Location cited in prior message" mean?
      If you are new to PC-Lint, you may have wondered what message 830 ("Location cited in prior message") means, and - given that such messages can add greatly to the overall issue count in your file or project - what ...


    December 2008

      Visual Lint 2.0.2.102 has been released
      The changes in this version include: Added options to allow reports to be generated to a user defined location rather than with the analysis results under the solution root folder [Visual Lint Professional and Enterprise Editions]. Added support for distributed ...

      Riverblade can now supply PC-Lint licences
      We are pleased to be able to announce that we have now come to an agreement with Gimpel Software (the PC-Lint vendor) to be able to resell PC-Lint 9.0 licences. As of today, if you place an order in our ...

      Turbocharge PC-Lint Analysis with Incredibuild
      If you have ever studied the wealth of add-in products available for MSVC, you will probably have come across IncrediBuild - a product which accelerates builds by distributing them to idle machines on your network. In essence it is a ...


    November 2008

      "Taming The Lint Monster"- ACCU London, 20th November
      If you are a member of ACCU - an organisation which promotes Professionalism in software development - you will almost certainly be familiar with the two ACCU journals CVu and Overload. Having recently submitted the first part of an article ...

      Business of Software London Meetup
      When a networking group grows from literally nothing to several hundred members in matter of a few weeks, it is definitely indicative of an untapped demand. Such is the case with the Business of Software networking group which has grown ...

      ESWC 2008 - Wrap up
      Rather than dash off back to the UK straight after the conference ended we booked the train back for Tuesday morning, and so had an additional day in Berlin before the long trip back. We were too tired to do ...

      ESWC 2008 Day 2
      Last night we descended en-masse on Berliner Republik, a quirky bar where the beer prices go up and down according to demand (they even have a mini stock exchange - watch for the crashes and run for the bar!). Really ...

      ESWC 2008 Day 1
      Last night's reception at Maximilian's restaurant on Friedrichstraße was great fun. Good food, great beer (I particularly liked the Berliner Weiß) and fantastic company. After breakfast we set up our stand in the sponsor's area (complete with the usual last ...

      ESWC 2008 Day 0
      As I write this we are sitting in the Checkpoint Bar at the hotel in Berlin waiting for the crowd to form for this evening's pre-conference event. We've had an interesting time getting here - Eurostar from St Pancras ...

      En-route to the ESWC
      At the end of this week we will once again be at the European Software Conference (in Berlin this time!). As such, please bear with us over the next few days as our internet connectivity may be a little patchy ...


    October 2008

      A message for Olivier Chatry
      We've been trying to contact you about an enquiry you made last night but your email address is bouncing. Could you please contact us via an alternate email address so that we can answer your query? ...

      The Windows release formally known as "Windows 7" is going to be called....
      (wait for it) - "Windows 7". Well at least it's simple, and certainly isn't as obviously contrived as "Windows Birmingham" or whatever. However, if you dig down to the about box you'll see that "7" is actually Windows version 6.1. ...

      Visual Lint 2.0.1.98 has been released
      The changes in this build include: Additional include folder specifications delimited by commas (rather than the more usual semicolons) are now handled correctly while generating project.lnt files. Corrected a bug in the handling of project specific environment variables. Added an ...


    September 2008

      Sometimes articles take as long as products to write
      The first time we attended the ACCU Conference back in April 2007 I was rather struck by how much I would enjoy writing for that audience. I actually started writing an article (something I've not done in a while due ...

      Detecting unused include files in C++ projects
      Sometimes the time to build or analyse your code can be a real pain. In C++, one of the things that can contribute to this is excessive header file nesting. As such, it is a good idea to take a ...

      It's Official - PC-Lint 9.0 is here
      If you have visited the Gimpel website over the past few days, you may have noticed some information on PC-Lint 9.0 leaking out. Although we have known about PC-Lint 9.0 for some time (we were one of the beta testers), ...


    August 2008

      Referral programme for existing customers
      In addition to the additional licences discount programme I described in the previous post, any existing customers who refer potential customers at other locations (regardless of whether within the same company or not) will receive free upgrades to Visual Lint ...

      10% discounts for additional licences purchased before 30th September
      Many customers (including some rather large corporations) buy single Visual Lint licences from us. However, if you are part of a large team, that really doesn't make much sense - for any code analysis tool to have a chance of ...

      Visual Lint 2.0 is coming!
      It's time we let the cat out of the bag - Visual Lint 2.0 will be released shortly! There are too many changes to describe in detail, but among those we are most excited about are: A new product edition ...


    July 2008

      Visual Lint 1.5.12.92 has been released
      The changes in this version include: When a whole project analysis task is aborted, the status of the project is now set to "not analysed". When an issue in the Analysis Results Display is activated (by a double click or ...

      Currency exchange rates - again!
      Anyone who has travelled between the UK (or indeed US) and mainland Europe recently cannot have failed to notice the increasing strength of the Euro relative to other currencies. That of course is something we need to take into account ...


    June 2008

      How to change the font used in the Raw Analysis Results Display
      By default, the "Raw Analysis Results" view within the Analysis Results Display attempts to use the font specified in the IDEs toolwindow font settings. If you need to override this for any reason, you can now (in Visual Lint 1.5.11.89 ...

      Visual Lint 1.5.11.89 has been released
      The changes in this version include: Added Goto Previous/Next Location support to the Analysis Results Display. Note that: This is currently available in VS2002 onwards only, as the keyboard bindings for VC6 and eVC4 are not accessible through the automation ...

      Cut Price Proliants
      Last October we bought a new build server (an HP Proliant ML110 G4 with dual core 1.86GHz Xeon) from Ebuyer. It's not exactly high end, but was stunningly cheap - as far as we were concerned a price of £190 ...

      Site host move
      We are now in the process of moving our website (which includes our long overdue new site design) to a new host. While we are waiting for the name server change to propagate across the internet it is entirely possible ...


    May 2008

      How to change the font used in the Message Lookup Display
      By default, the Message Lookup Display uses a Courier font for displaying the details of selected messages. Although the font used in the display is not configurable via the user interface, it can (as can be seen in the screenshot ...

      Visual Lint 1.5.10.83 has been released
      The changes in this version include: Added update checking, via an Installaware scheduled task (note that the product update check is scheduled from a checkbox on the completion page rather than the InstallAware default of on the next login). Start ...

      LintProject 1.4.0.10 has been released
      The changes in this version include: Removed all MFC dependencies. LintProject now uses ATL 7 directly, and in consequence, the source now requires Visual Studio .NET 2002 or later to compile (project files are supplied for Visual Studio .NET 2003 ...


    April 2008

      Post-conference snowballs
      Well, the conference is finally over and we're packing to go home. It feels like the week has flown by - it's hard to believe we've been living out of the same hotel room for 6 days now! We would ...

      The Last Day...
      Seven Deadly Sins of Debugging (Roger Orr) Roger is a member of the ISO C++ Standards Committee, and a specialist in the field of debugging. Having attended one of his sessions last year, we had a pretty good idea that ...

      Is it Friday already?
      May You Live in Interesting Times (Andrei Alexandrescu) This session was a humourous illustration of the ideas and issues involved in the C++ 0x language design, and how tricky it can be to design a modern language. Andrei very humourously ...

      A Lakos induced day off
      Today's sessions were pretty much a washout for me after the experiences (is that the right word?) of last night. Although I did attend David Vest's "Starting and running a MicroISV" session (nothing new there for me, but that's ...

      This year's fun begins
      This morning was a bit of a rush as we did some last minute fine tuning on the "Death by Powerpoint" rolling presentation we will be using on our stand at the sponsors reception this evening. When we finally arrived ...

      A Functional Workout
      Today is the pre-conference workshop day, and Beth and I have both opted for Joe Armstrong's "Fun with Erlang" session. If you've not come across it before, Erlang is a functional language designed for concurrent programming. For someone from an ...


    March 2008

      On our way to the ACCU Conference
      It's that time of year again. Tomorrow lunchtime Beth and I will be leaving the palm trees behind and driving up to Oxford for the ACCU Conference (we're going up a day early to do the "Fun with Erlang" ...

      .vsprops files and additional include folders
      One of the most useful features of PC-Lint is its ability to process Visual C++ project files and generate .lnt files containing the corresponding project settings for a given configuration. This of course frees the user from the truly horrible ...


    February 2008

      Visual Lint 1.5.9.79 has been released
      We are pleased to be able to announce that Visual Lint 1.5.9.79 has been released. The following changes are included in this build: Added (at customer request) support for additional includes within inherited property sheets (.vsprops files) under VS2002/VS2003/VS2005/VS2008. Improved ...

      Visual Studio Gallery
      I've just stumbled across (via Scott Dorman's blog) the Visual Studio Gallery - a new site showcasing products and extensions for Visual Studio, run as part of the Visual Studio Extensibility (VSX) effort. Even at this early stage it looks ...


    November 2007

      Time Pressures and ISVs
      I've just read the ISV Burnout thread on the Business of Software Forum with a great deal of interest : "I've got a full time job a wife and an 18 months old son. I'm a happy family man, but ...

      Riverblade at the ESWC
      It's been a mad few days. Beth and I arrived in Cologne late on Thursday afternoon for the European Software Conference, which kicked off on Friday evening with a beer and bratwurst style (what else could it be?) gathering at ...


    October 2007

      So this is what conference preparation is like...
      For the last couple of months or so we've been charging around trying to get everything ready for the European Software Conference[^] in Cologne this weekend. As we are sponsoring the event this year, we've actually had to get some ...

      Service Interruptions and Comment Spam
      If you've tried to access our site over the past few hours you will have been confronted by a rather unfriendly "account suspended" page. The cause was the volume of comment spam this page has been receiving - apparently it ...


    September 2007

      Firefox issues fixed
      I'm happy to say that we've finally managed to track down the CSS issue that was causing Firefox to render pages on this site (and in particular the navigation bar) incorrectly. We still have some minor cross browser niggles to ...

      We've been "Podcasted"...
      If you've been reading this blog for a while you may remember that last November we attended the European Shareware Conference 2006 (ESWC) in Cambridge. This was the first conference we had attended as a company, and the first I've ...


    August 2007

      Visual Lint 1.5.7.74 has been released
      We are happy to announce that Visual Lint 1.5.7.74 has been released. This is a significant update, and incorporates all changes from development builds since the last public release (1.5.6.70). The following changes are included in this build: Whole project ...


    July 2007

      Riverblade are sponsoring ESWC 2007
      It's not often you will see one of our banner ads, and that's no surprise - until now we've been so busy dealing with the technical side of things that we've not made the time to seriously consider our ...


    June 2007

      Visual Lint 1.5.6.70 and LintProject 1.3.1.7 have been released
      We are happy to announce that Visual Lint 1.5.6.70 and LintProject 1.3.1.7 have been released. The following changes are included in Visual Lint 1.5.6.70: Fixed a bug which was preventing the Analysis Results Display from updating if the corresponding file ...


    May 2007

      Thurs 24th May: ACCU South-Coast event "Advocating Agility"
      Next Thursday (24th May) ACCU South-Coast are running the first of what will hopefully be a long series of open sessions/social gatherings. To give us a reason for meeting up and sharing a beer/coke/whatever else tickles your fancy Kate Ollis ...

      Exchange Rates and Pricing
      When we first released Visual Lint, the US-UK exchange rate was running at about US$1.75 to the pound. It is now close to $2.00, and not surprisingly we are seeing a corresponding effect on the turnover from our sales. Although ...

      Visual Lint 1.5.5.69 has been released
      We are happy to announce that Visual Lint 1.5.5.69 has been released. The following changes are included in this build: Added support for Visual Studio 9.0 (codename "Orcas") Beta 1. Individual files can now be manually excluded from background analysis ...


    April 2007

      Visual Studio "Orcas" Beta 1
      We thought we'd be ahead of the game for once... :-> When Visual Studio "Orcas" Beta 1 was released to MSDN subscribers a few days ago we downloaded a copy and installed it on one of our development boxes (a ...

      Back to Reality
      We're now back in Bournemouth, for the first time since Monday. We've had a great time at the Conference this week. We've learnt a great deal, met some amazing (and very entertaining in some cases!) people, made some very useful ...

      A Qt way to eat breakfast
      At breakfast time yesterday morning we were sitting in a conference room listening to a seminar by Trolltech - the people behind the Qt cross platform C++ framework. Although we use WTL for our current projects, we are always ...

      Forgive Me Father, for I Have Singleton'ed
      (or: When Patterns meet Anti-Patterns, do they Annihilate?) We've had a late start this morning, skipping the opening session because we needed a break after the marathon yesterday (I crashed out with a headache at 6pm yesterday, only waking up ...

      What do you mean, it's morning?
      The theme of "more beer" at last nights final session was a predictive one. Afterwards everybody gradually congregated in the hotel bar to socialise. As tends to happen, a consensus on where to go next gradually arose, as a ...

      Tar'ed and Feathered
      This morning we decided to try out the hotel pool (and spa - they have a steam room and sauna too) before breakfast. It was an excellent way to start the day, but (I suspect) one we won't repeat as ...

      Getting Agile
      Yesterday was the pre-conference workshop day. We'd pre-booked for the agile development workshop with Kevlin Henney, and it turned out to be a good choice. After the (very entertaining) initial presentation we organised into teams of four for the workshop ...

      Sangria, Disarrono and Dismembered Laptops
      I'm writing this from the breakfast bar at the Paramount Oxford hotel. With the conference starting in less than an hour we're killing time. The drive here from Bournemouth was easy, although we lost the sun somewhere along the ...

      On our way to the ACCU Conference
      We're just about to head off to Oxford for the ACCU Conference. As I'm not entirely sure what internet connectivity we're going to be able to find when we get there, please bear with us if we're a little slower ...


    March 2007

      Visual Lint 1.5.4.67 has been released
      We are happy to announce that Visual Lint 1.5.4.67 has been released. This is a major release, incorporating as it does a new installer, full support for Windows Vista and a multitude of changes from intervening development builds since 1.5.3.63 ...

      Bringing the Visual Lint Installer into the 21st Century
      Since the first internal build of Visual Lint back in October 2004 it has used the Visual Studio Installer project generated by the Visual Studio add-in Wizard. As far as it goes it's OK, although the installers it generates have ...

      Assimilating some of the better bits from the Vista User Interface
      (or: Replacing Message Boxes with Task Dialogs, and other related improvements) When we first ran Visual Lint on Vista RC1 we were struck by the potential which some of the user interface features of the new OS (notably Task Dialogs, ...

      ACCU Conference 2007: we'll be there
      Last November we attended our first conference - the European Shareware Conference (ESWC) at the Crown Plaza hotel in Cambridge. It was a very useful (albeit exhausting) weekend - we made some great contacts, acquired a new installer (InstallAware) and ...


    February 2007

      Funny how technology "improves" with time...
      Last night in a fit of boredom I thought I'd have a quick go at writing a basic mobile app to run on my PDA (a Mio P500 GPS running Windows Mobile 5.0). One VS2005 project wizard later and I ...

      Visual Lint 1.5.3.63 has been released
      We are pleased to announce that Visual Lint 1.5.3.63 is now available. The most significant change in the release is the addition of support (at customer request) for Microsoft eMbedded Visual C++ 4.0. The following changes are included in this ...


    January 2007

      "We Live in Interesting Times" (or: Windows Vista: Not For Developers)
      With the consumer release of Windows Vista happening today (and being much lower key than I expected, quite frankly) I think it is time to dust off this blog entry I drafted a couple of months ago. It pretty much ...

      Running Visual Lint under Windows Vista
      In the FAQ for Visual Lint we state that "We are in the process of testing on Windows Vista, and hope to have a compatible version soon. Please contact us if you have any queries about compatibility with a particular ...

      Visual Lint 1.5.2.62 has been released
      We are pleased to announce that Visual Lint 1.5.2.62 is now available. This is a maintenance release, and contains no new functionality over that in 1.5.1.61. We have however made a number of minor improvements and bug fixes. The following ...


    November 2006

      Test Driven Development - I'm Sold
      Unit Testing - and Test Driven Development - are rapidly emerging as one of the most effective techniques to improve code quality and reduce defect counts. or a while now it has been clear to me that this was the ...

      "We Apologise For The Inconvenience"
      ...so reads God's Final Message to His Creation - at least according to The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. When I stumbled out of bed at something like 6am this morning and blearily went to check my email I noticed ...

      How closely integrated into Visual Studio is Visual Lint?
      Visual Studio .NET 2002, Visual Studio .NET 2003 and Visual Studio 2005 allow extremely close integration into the IDE. Under these environments, Visual Lint will integrate its commands into the Visual Studio menubar and command bars, and even add a ...

      Visual Lint 1.5 has been released
      I'm happy to announce that after 6 months of solid development (of which the last month has been particularly busy) we've finally got to the point where we consider Visual Lint 1.5 (build 1.5.0.60, to be exact) to be ready ...

      European Shareware Conference 2006
      We've just returned from the European Shareware Conference 2006 at the Crown Plaza Hotel in Cambridge. Despite the name, it was heavily focused on ISVs (micro and not so micro), and the content was highly relevant - addressing such ...


    October 2006

      Our PC-Lint warning policy files
      One of the most annoying tasks a developer starting to use a code analysis tool such as PC-Lint faces is to tne their configuration to work well with the frameworks they use and eliminate "noise" from library and framework header ...


    September 2006

      Windows Vista RC1 - First Contact
      Sometimes everything happens at once, and this week was certainly one of those weeks. About 6 weeks ago we ordered a new system from Mesh - a Matrix 2 Prestige system running XP Pro with Athlon X2 5000+ processor, 2GB ...

      Grrr....comment spammers
      Over the past few months we've seen a rather more than steady increase in the volume of comment spam this blog has been attracting. At first it was a mere irritation; however it has now got to the point where ...


    June 2006

      New features in Visual Lint 1.1
      Over the past three months we've been rapidly working our way through our "todo" list for the development of next version of Visual Lint - Visual Lint 1.1. We've had preliminary builds with our testers since early May now, and ...

      Visual Lint 1.0.5.48 has been released
      We are pleased to announce that Visual Lint 1.0.5.48 is now available. The changes included in this version are: Modified the balloon tip component used by Visual Lint to display notifications when a solution analysis completes etc. for compatibility with ...


    May 2006

      Visual Lint 1.0.4.46 has been released
      We are pleased to announce that Visual Lint 1.0.4.46 is now available. Although this is a minor update (most of our efforts at the moment are going into Visual Lint 1.1, which will incidentally be a free upgrade) it does ...


    March 2006

      An update on Visual Studio 6.0 support in Visual Lint
      Things are getting rather busy here. The Visual Lint codebase was branched a couple of weeks ago (shortly after the public release of Visual Lint 1.0.3.45), and we're now working away on the next version - Visual Lint 1.1. Although ...

      New Development version of LintProject (1.3.0.6) available
      We've found some time recently between Visual Lint builds to dust off the source for LintProject and add a long awaited feature - support for solution configurations. As a result, LintProject 1.3.0.6 is now available on the LintProject Downloads page. ...

      Visual Lint 1.0.3.45 has been released
      We are pleased to announce that Visual Lint 1.0.3.45 is now available. This focus in this version is to further improve useability and performance. The Analysis Status and Results Displays are both now virtual list controls, and therefore much better ...


    February 2006


    January 2006

      Visual Lint 1.0.2.43 has been released
      We are pleased to announce that Visual Lint 1.0.2.43 is now available. This version primarily addresses issues we have enountered with the RTM version of Visual Studio 2005 (we received our copies just before Christmas) which is proving to be ...

      Why on earth can't they just leave interfaces alone?
      ...or: "why is it so difficult to figure out how to read the Visual C++ Include Folder configuration in VS2005?" The answer is of course that the interfaces have been changed. I don't know why, but I do know that ...


    December 2005

      Our complementary copies of VS2005 have arrived!
      Earlier this week a little mouse told me (actually someone posted the news in the Lounge!) that Microsoft had started shipping the complementary copies of Visual Studio 2005 Professional and SQL Server 2005 Standard we received vouchers for at the ...

      Visual Lint 1.0.1.41 has been released
      We are pleased to announce that Visual Lint 1.0.1.41 is now available. This is a maintenance release, and includes the following changes: Added an "Order" column to the Analysis Results Displays so it can be sorted by the order messages ...

      Back-porting, the fun way
      The timing is nothing short of hilarious. Just a couple of days after MS pulled Visual Studio 6.0 from MSDN, I'm merrily having a go at back-porting Visual Lint (a complex project by any standards - it consists of 51,000 ...


    November 2005

      Visual Lint 1.0 has been released
      I'm happy to be able to announce that our Online Store is now up and running and Visual Lint 1.0 is now formally available. You can now download the current build (1.0.0.40) from the Downloads page. If you wish to ...

      Are we nearly there yet?
      I'm happy to say the answer is 'yes'. After just over a year of development (we started in October 2004) Visual Lint 1.0 is ready to go! Since the beginning of the month we have shifted from our usual fortnightly ...

      Watching MS push Visual Studio 2005 down a greasy slipway...
      Yesterday was an interesting change from our usual routine - we took a day out to travel up to London to attend one of the Visual Studio 2005/SQL Server 2005 launch events. It's actually the first time either of ...

      Platforms, Platforms, Platforms
      The dilemma of which which target platforms to support is a neverending one for software developers and vendors. Inevitably, whatever conclusion you reach will inconvenience someone, somewhere. It's one tricky balancing act. loun As an ISV specialising in extensibility products ...


    October 2005

      I know we've been a little quiet...
      It's certainly not that there's any shortage of stuff to write about - merely that I've been so focused on product development recently that writing has had to take a backseat. Although that's not something I'm particularly happy about, I ...


    April 2005

      The next version of LintProject
      This weekend we were finally able to dust off the LintProject source and started preparing the next version. Although we're been concentrating heavily on Visual Lint recently, we've now reached the stage where we can take a short breather while ...


    March 2005

      Visual Studio .NET Add-in installation
      I said in my previous post I'd talk about add-in installation. One of the most interesting ones concerns the installation of the add-in. Unlike the skeleton add-ins created by the Visual Studio .NET Add-in Wizard, Visual Lint creates its registry ...

      LintProject 1.2.4 released
      We're pleased to announce that a new version (1.2.4) of our LintProject command line tool is now available. The changes in this version are as follows: CSolutionLintAnalyser::Analyse() and CProjectLintAnalyser::Analyse() now use SHCreateDirectoryEx() instead of mkdir() to create folders for analysis ...


    January 2005

      A first look at a rather useful display in Visual Lint
      Every so often in the development of a product you have one of those wonderful "Yes!!!" moments., and we are certainly no exception. Our most recent one came on Thursday evening, when one of the displays we'd envisaged for ...

      Ever wondered what your icons are up to when you're not looking?
      A little light relief for a change. I thought I'd share a Flash animation which really made me giggle today: Ever wondered what your icons are up to when you're not looking?. Keep a close eye on the Diablo icon ...

      Wide awake and ready to code - at 4am
      For the last few days we've been very busy here - mainly working on our own products and making some changes to our desktop machines*. It's pretty busy, but productive...in the last few days we've not only released an update ...

      The dust has settled on ResOrg 1.6, so it's time to start thinking about the next version
      Now that ResOrg 1.6.1 is out, it's as good a time as any to start building a wish list for the next ResOrg release. Here are a few ideas we've got in mind, or have been suggested by users of ...

      ResOrg 1.6.1 has been released
      We're pleased to announce that - after a final burst of work over the Christmas holiday - the next version of ResOrg (1.6.1) is now available. You can download it either from the Downloads page or from the companion article ...


    December 2004

      ResOrg 1.6.1 is (almost) good to go
      Yesterday we built the first release candidate for the next version of ResOrg - 1.6.1. Although it's been longer in the making than we hoped, the delay has proved to be worth it. Not only does this version include one ...

      Scrollbar voodoo, the MFC way
      There are some development tasks that - no matter how you look at them - you just know are going to be messy. I've just finished an small piece of functionality in the forthcoming version of ResOrg which falls into ...

      The challenge of add-in development
      The development of add-ins has got to be one of the most challenging types of product development I've encountered. Not only must you have a vision for where your project is going and how it should work, but you must ...

      A tale of two add-ins
      Over the last couple of months we've been concentrating our efforts on the development of Visual Lint. Unfortunately there are only a limited number of hours in the day and as a result we've had to delay the release of ...

      Welcome to the Riverblade Blog
      Welcome to the Riverblade Blog. We hope this blog will provide an insight into our products and how they're evolving. Most importantly, we want this to provide a forum where you can tell us what you think about our products, ...

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