I’ve been using SubSonic for a while now and I totally love it. Not only has it made developing in .net fun again, it’s also been a huge productivity booster for me and the guys I work with.

And while I appreciate all of the hard work that the team has put into the SubSonic Build Provider for use with WebSite Projects, I just don’t work that way. I like having the actual generated code files included in my project (be it a WebSite or WebApplication) and checked into source control. I gives me the warm and fuzzies. But I digress....

Gimme some shortcuts

To reduce the friction of manually running the SubSonic code generator I’ve setup some Groovy VS Shortcuts a la Rob. One of the options that you have when setting up VS External Tools is to Use Output Window to handle any output that would normally get dumped to the screen in a command line application.

When setting up my SubSonic shortcuts I made sure to check that box so I could see all of the pretty status and tracing messages get pumped out to the screen while SubSonic does it’s thing.

I really love seeing that Done! line at the bottom. It lets me know things went OK. Again - its the warm and fuzzies.

This setup has served me well. I’ve been using it since the SubSonic 1.0 days and it’s not failed me yet. Err, at least not until now.

Trouble in paradise

Seemingly out of the blue the Output Window stopped receiving output when I ran my SubSonic shortcuts. I’d fire off one of the shortcuts and the Output Window would pop up, but it was empty! Odder yet was that the window was still getting output when I would compile - so it wasn’t totally broken.

My first thought was that a recent upgrade to SubSonic 2.0.2 and then 2.0.3 had changed something. Rather than investigate it too much myself I Skyped Eric to see if he had any ideas. Lucky for me he did.

Per Eric’s advice I removed and re-added all of my SubSonic External Tools and then gave it another go. No dice! But wait... perhaps Eric was on to something and it really is an issue with how the External Tools are configured.

And there it was. Somehow a gremlin had gained access to my PC, fired up VS, and changed the settings for my External Tools. The sneaky devil actually went in and checked the Treat output as Unicode checkbox!

After unchecking that option the SubSonic shortcuts were once again talking to the Output Window. All was once again right with the world. Except of course for that gremlin... I have a suspicion that he’s still around somewhere. I’ll keep a bottle of seltzer water next to my desk - just in case.