After receiving a 16MB zip file of a native solution from a customer today, I've updated CleanSweep to clean out a lot of the crap created by the native build process (the last version was mostly for managed code).

I've also added very, very basic command-line support.  Right now if you provide no command line, it will clean the directory it is run from.  If you want to clean another folder, you pass the full path to the foilder to clean as the command line.

In my line of work it's pretty common to get zipped up packages containing source for a project from a customer.  Unfortunately iot's also really, really common for those zip files to be bloated will all sorts of garbage from the build, and it's irritating - I just received a 25MB file from a customer this morning.

Typically I go through and manually delete stuff to clean it up, but this solution had a lot of subfolders, and I'm a fan of automating anything you've done more than twice, so I took this as an opportunity to generate a utility that does this clean up for me. 

Version 1 is very basic - it should have some command-line options, etc - but it gets the job done and changing behavior to add other files/folders/extensions is simple (see the source).  Right now it will delete any files with the following extensions: .suo, .user, .scc, .vssscc, .vspscc, .pdb and any folder with one of these names: bin, obj, Debug, Release, TempPE.



The tool and full source is available for download here

USE THIS TOOL AT YOUR OWN RISK! 
Basically if you use it and lose some all-important data then consider that an object lesson in the virtues of source control free of charge.

Here's hoping that people start using it *before* sending me packages. If not it's still useful for recovering drive space and cleaning up project folders before putting them in source control.

So we've announced this month's coding competiton theme (get your keyboards fired up).

Last month's competiton didn't have quite the effect we wanted: we only got one submission.  Still if you consider that the goal of the competition is to get cool code out to the developer community as a whole, then the FlowFx submission alone made the competition a success.  But still, we'd like to see a bit more diverse set of entries.  In an attempt to improve things this month we're offering prizes for multiple places (first, second and 3 runners-up) so that no one will get discouraged and abandon all hope if they see some crazy-cool submission early in the month (like I suspect happened with FlowFx).

Any other thoughts on how we can make the competition more successful (short of giving away an X-Box 360, a copy of Halo 3 and a 60" plasma TV to play it on - that's just not in our budget)?

Mark has just published a couple articles with just about everything you could want to know about inking:

Using the OpenNETCF Mobile Ink Library for Windows Mobile 6
Sharing Windows Mobile Ink with the Desktop

If you write applications that query a database - any database - then you might want to check out my new article on data caching.

If you do as much development on devices as we do, I'm sure you would appreciate a tool like Remote Process Viewer, but that runs on the device.  Something like the Task Manager on the desktop, right?  Well we've finally productized and released a tool we wrote and have been using internally for quite some time called TaskManCF.  It gives you the ability to kill an app (via WM_CLOSE like the "Running Programs" applet) Terminate a process (via Terminate Process), suspend, kill or change the priority of *any* thread in the system plus view all loaded modules.

It runs on CE or Pocket PC/WM (not Smartphone - sorry) and, as the name implies, uses the Compact Framework version 2.0.

Get the evaluation version or purchase it here