There are so many useful debugging features built into Visual Studio that aren’t well-known. Here are a few of my favourites, including some recent finds in VS 2013.
Clicking the left gutter to set breakpoints, you could easily believe breakpoints happen at line-level.
There is a fair amount of info on making and publishing NuGet packages but I couldn’t find a simplified guide for the simple case. Here it is and start by downloading nuget.exe and putting it in your path.
Supporting multiple platforms gives you a choice to make:
The Visual Studio Gallery is already home to 533 tools, controls and templates for VS 2010 and this number is sure to grow once VS 2010 hits RTM and people get to grips with the extendable new editor.
Don’t forget to check out The Visual Studio Blog for more tips, tricks and tools.
The guys over on the AnkhSVN team have acquired new members and burnt the midnight oil to deliver a great 2.0 release with:
Despite all these great features it’s absolutely freeabsolutely free and still works with older versions of Subversion and both Visual Studio 2005 and 2008.
A newer version of this LINQ to SQL template is available
While SQLMetal does a good job of turning your SQL schema into a set of classes for you it doesn’t let you customize the code generation process.
The various Heroes Happen HereHeroes Happen Here community events in the UK/USA to celebrate the launch of Visual Studio 2008 etc. made me envious that we don’t get such events and goodies here on the little island of Guernsey so I thought I’d so something about it!
We at the Guernsey Software Developer Forum are hosting a community event in conjunction with Microsoft to celebrate the launch of Visual Studio 2008, Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008.
AnkhSVN 2.0 is now out with the majority of these features making the cut!
Now that AnkhSVN 1.0.3 is out with support for Visual Studio 2008 we can discuss our future plans for AnkhSVN.
Rob Conery got me thinking about web site maintenance and I put forward a brief comment on the two distinct types and how Visual Studio handles them which I have expanded upon here.
Primarily for working with ad-hoc web sites that have programmed elements. Easily identified by customer-specific content present in aspx files.
The next version of my Envy Code R font especially designed for programming (monospaced, easily distinguishable characters) is nearing completion and represents a very response-driven update to feedback, specifically:
I have also fleshed out a number of additional symbols and accented letters that has seen the number of code pages supported increase to 12 pages and made a large number of tweaks to the italic version which was a last-minute addition to 0.6 (PR6) and had a number of errors especially round the accented letters.
The default syntax color scheme in Visual Studio seems to be stuck in the 16-color era so once you’ve found your perfect font you are going to need a great theme to go with it.
Here is the theme I’m currently using at home (currently on a 42″ 1900×1200 LCD TV until I can find space for my monitor) that a couple of people have asked for.
Refactoring is an essential process to keep code clean and elegant while it evolves. IDE’s offer common refactorings (although somewhat short of those prescribed in Fowler’s excellent Refactoring book and way short of the overall goals explained in Kerievsky’s Refactoring Patterns).
One limitation of existing tools is that they can only update references within your solution. When you are refactoring a shared library this is a problem, especially if it is your public API to the outside world.
I came across a posting by Thomas Restrepo about a theme for Vim he likes called Wombat and how it wouldn’t be worth porting to Visual Studio as it doesn’t support italic syntax highlighting — as we all know.
This got me thinking and I was able to port it with italicswith italics although the process is a bit of a hack.
AnkhSVN 1.0 has been released!
If you use Visual Studio 2003 or 2005 and are currently either using the TortoiseSVN shell extension (or Subversion command line) then you would do well to see just how much more productive having source-control available from within the IDE can be.
If like me you have a couple of machines, a few virtual machines and secondary installations such as Express editions (for XNA of course) you can easily loose track of which have been patched with service pack 1. Especially if you also messed around with the SP1 beta.
Help > AboutHelp > About from Visual Studio 2005 can tell us — cryptically…
While Visual Studio is quite a capable IDE it isn’t perfect — here is my personal top 10 list of things I hate about it. I’ve kept the gripes to the IDE itself — the issues I have with .NET Framework deserve a post of their own some time.
Sometimes your solution has to be a mixed language one — you know the odd VB.NET class library that nobody wants to rewrite in C#.
Christopher Bennage wrote about his development tool set-up and encouraged others to do the same so here’s my current set-up.
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AnkhSVN has been updated since this post.
AnkhSVN is a Visual Studio add-in that delivers Subversion functionality where you need it and Arild has just made available release candidate 4 of the forthcoming 1.0 version.
Like most people I’ve run into my fair share of oddities and problems in Visual Studio 2005 including the dreaded VB compiler dying a death on reasonable-sized projects so I jumped at the chance to get my hands on the beta of SP1.
There are several versions of the service pack including one for Visual Studio 2005, one for each of the Express editions and one for the Team Foundation Server. My experiences here are with the 350MB SP1 beta for Visual Studio 2005.
The Visual Studio IDE (VS2003, VS2005) is a massive beast with a plethora of options, settings and tweaks to be had.
A few of my favorite, often overlooked ones, are:
Beta 1 of Microsoft’s free XNA Game Studio Express product should be available for download later today.
If you haven’t already got started you’ll need to download the following bits first:
I’ve briefly covered Microsoft’s XNA gaming platform before but have been trying to piece together what it is actually going to mean to developers.
Sorry, had to clarify the whole commercial/non-commercial parts. XNA Framework is just a portion of XNA… that won’t apply to the big guys.
One of the things that annoyed me with Visual Studio.NET 2003 and Visual Studio 2005 is the web “project” type.
The main problem is that these projects are not treated as traditional applications, but in order to please the ad-hoc web developer crowd they are treated as collections of files with no specific project options or compilation process — instead compiled on-the-fly by the web server.
I recently ran into a problem while debugging inside Visual Studio 2003.Net. Google couldn’t find me an answer, only a few other people with the same problem. Here’s my solution in the hope it might save somebody else some time.
Whenever debugging a specific VB.NET application that used a C# class library I would receive the following error certain objects in the C# class library: