InspectionPrinter Initial Release

By Eric — 1 minute read

I've released the first version of my InspectionPrinter utility. We have been renewing our efforts to do more formal code inspections at NextPage recently, which finally motivated me to finish this thing off, having originally started it nearly two years ago. It can be downloaded from the software section.

The original motivations for creating were:

  1. It bugged me that it would take so long to figure out all the printing settings to get a good amount of code on a page with line numbers using whatever IDE was current at the time.
  2. I didn't like printing out lots of pages for optional reviewers who just ended up throwing it away.
  3. I wanted something that would be consistent regardless of the programming language being used.

InspectionPrinter was written in C#, integrating with HTMLDOC to produce a PDF document. I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to use the .NET Framework to incorporate an external command-line tool. The System.Diagnostics.Process class is really fantastic, allowing silent running of the external executable and easy capture of stdout.

Going forward I'd really like to be able to do diff printouts as well, since we sometimes want to inspect bug fixes that might touch several large files in small ways, and including all the code isn't so helpful.