Rainbow Portal

On this page you will find a list of tools that Rainbow developers have found useful and links to other web sites with helpful information for using ASP.NET, Mobile Internet devices, CVS, etc.

 

CVS Tools 

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The Rainbow team uses CVS to control our source code at SourceFoorge.  There a several freeware and commercial tools avilable for accessing CVS source code from the Windows family of OSes.

• TortoiseCVS - Windows Explorer plug-in for CVS access
• WinCVS - standalone CVS client

• CVS SCC proxy plug-in - $19 VS.NET plug-in to access CVS as though it were VSS.

Build Utilities and Free IDEs

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• CSC Build (don't have VS.NET?  Use these CSC (.rsp) makefiles to build debug and produciton versions of Rainbow) v1738.  This is much simpler and easier than using NANT - by Chris Farrell.
• WebMatrix - a free IDE with color coding, database browsing and other features.  No proper code-behind support.
• SharpDevelop - an open source (GPL) IDE that uses NANT to build Rainbow, v0.97 is farily buggy, but its worth looking at.

File and directory comparisons

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These tools can be extrememly helpful for comparing the differences between text and binary files.  Most can work on individual files or an entire directory hierarchy.

• WinMerge (GNU license - opensource)
• Beyond Compare 2 ($30)
• ExamDiff Pro ($35)
• Araxis Merge ($124)
• WinDiff (free with VisualStudio 6)

IIS and SMTP references

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Rainbow uses the IIS web server, and if you wish to use the newsletter module, and other mail-enabled features of Rainbow you'll need to run Windows SMTP (simple mail transfer protocal) server

• Microsoft KB article HOW TO: Test Windows 2000 IIS SMTP Services Manually

Contributor Utilities

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Rainbow contributors and friends have built or found several free tools that can improve your productivity creating a Rainbow solution.  Feel free to download and enjoy these tools.

Rainbow html translator - by matteo_fattore@hotmail.com
It is a stand alone application. It’s Just ten lines of vb.net code.

SQL Server Code Generator - by matteo_fattore@hotmail.com
A VB application that automatically generates data access stored procedures and data access stubs given the name of a database table.  It works but could use some enhancements.  It is provided only as a sample VB code generator.  Contact Matteo if you would like to help enhance this code.

Duemetri Rainbow Code Generator - by Manu
This tool is described in the developers whitepaper. It requires VB6 .dlls and the SQL Server client libraries to run.