Eric Cosky

Just starts XSI with memory limits to keep it from going crazy on the virtual memory. If XSI starts using too much memory, memory allocations will begin to fail, preventing XSI from hogging the system. This may and can result in XSI having an application failure of some sort.

It is provided as a Visual Studio 2008 project.

The default memory limit is 1 gig.

You must review the code for correctness and suitability, compile and build it yourself to use. 

Use at your own risk.

I've been using the Visual Studio 2008 beta for a while now, and recently I discovered the built in support for unit testing. It's pretty slick, well integrated, and soon I found myself using it to answer some performance questions that had been lingering for some time related to how to best pass large value types around in C#. In my case, I'm interested in Matrix3D, a struct with a 4x4 matrix for a total of 16 doubles in it weighing in at 128 bytes. That's quite a chunk of data to pass in as a parameter to a function or to copy from the stack as a return value. Because I have so much code that depends on passing matrices and other large value types around, I decided to use the new unit testing features to try to measure which approach would produce the best performance. This is what I found out.

As I was doing some experiments with my Virtual PC setup, I realized my base disk image was just too small. I was trying to install the Windows Driver Development Kit, and the installation failed because the disk simply had no room for it. When I first created my disk image, which is a basic Windows XP installation on a single NTFS partition that filled the VHD with a variety of utilities added to it to make my work easier, I created the VHD using the disk wizard with the disk size to 4 GB. I thought that because I had set it to be a dynamically expanding disk that it would allow the disk to grow to any size I needed later. Unfortunately, I was wrong; the disk is limited to 4GB but it will only be as large as is needed to store the used sectors. This makes sense now that I know more about it, but I was left with a decision to either reinstall XP from scratch or find some way to extend the partition.

File Report Generator Screenshot

This is a very simple utility for creating reports about files. You can drag & drop files into it or use it as a Send To target to build a list of files which are then listed out in a format similar to what you would get by using a command line directory command and redirecting the output to a file. It's a bit nicer though, in that you can gather all the files you want reported on and it will sort by folder and various other options.