Visual Studio

LINQPad is an awesome aide to .NET Developers. Written by Joseph Albahari of LinqBridge and the C# In a Nutshell series fame. LINQPad allows the developer to write, compile and run C# or VB.NET Expressions, Statements of Programs outside of Visual Studio. Everything I am going to show you in this post can be done with Visual Studio simply by wrapping the text in a new console application, and adding references to the DLLs. However I strongly encourage you to download LINQPad and give it a go. In the event you are using 64-bit windows and are still using LINQPad 2 you will need to download the x86 version of LINQPad 2, as all of the EVEMon assemblies are compiled for x86. If you have LINQPad 4 you don’t need to worry about. Assuming you have EVEMon installed, the first step is to load the EVEMon.Common.dll assembly into LINQPad: ...

Code outlining is a feature of supported by Visual Studio and many other editors, MSDN has some good documentation for VS2005, VS2008 and VS2010. If I were asked to explain this as briefly as possible, I would probably say: Code Outlining is the logical partitioning of code in such a way that the user interface, or editor, is able to selectively hide the body of the content (such as a class, struct, enum or method) whilst leaving the signature or some identifying comment visible. ...

Windows 7 turned up in the post today. The red box is Visual Studio 2008 which is there to show that the boxes have a similar profile to the old style hard cases. I have been running the Beta since it was first available to the general public, and I have had Windows 7 Business at work for a couple of weeks now. Bought Windows 7 Home Premium for about £45 from Tesco. One copy for the main PC which I will probably re-build at Christmas and one copy for the laptop which is re-built now. ...

I found this function totally accidentally when I knocked my mouse into a key when something interesting popped up on Twitter. I happened to have a variable selected like so: The key that I knocked was the Number Pad “+” key, and it expanded the selection like this: As any self respecting Systems Administrator would do I wondered if doing exactly the same thing repeatedly would have equal or compound effects. Strangely enough it worked, the selection will continue to expand selecting increasingly larger sections of code. The reverse works as well if you press the Number Pad “-” key the selection will be reduced. ...

As I mentioned in my previous entry I have started using DevExpress’s CodeRush Xpress. It is a free cut down version of CodeRush that I heard about in an episode of .NET Rocks. I have wanted add something to my Visual Studio development experience and I can’t justify the cost of either Resharper or CodeRush at the moment. There has been quite a bit of discussion about Resharper vs. CodeRush and in my experience most people I have spoken to love one and hate the other. I hope to be able to write a series of posts about some of the features found in CodeRush Xpress which I hope will clarify their purpose and use in my mind and maybe help someone find the function they are looking for. First off “Quick File Navigation”, this is a search function for locating a file by file name, I am finding it increasingly useful when looking through patches as it allows me to very quickly jump to a file name. Particularly as I am trying to move my projects to a one class per file so if I can remember the class name I can find the code file very quickly. The “Quick File Navigation” dialog is accessible through the keyboard short cut Ctrl+Alt+F. Typing will filter the list box by the name of the file matching anywhere in the filename including the extension. An additional feature for those who like me use CamelCase in their file names; if you enter your filter terms in capital letters it will search for capitalized words, in order within file names. Thus entering “AW” into the search box will also bring up the AboutWindow.cs in the above solution. Combining the above with the Ctrl-G keyboard shortcut in Visual Studio 2008 to go to a specific line we can do the following to go to line 162 in ShipLoadoutSelectWindow.cs: ...

I have been working on EVEMon for about two months now, taking on the responsibility of committing changes to the trunk, fixing bugs and adding new features. As a project I have been involved for several years submitting bug fixes and little features, it was down to my experiences with EVEMon that I decided to implement Subversion and Trac at work. Unfortunately the first time it came to me to be responsible for a release, it seemed to go terribly wrong. The updated installer worked fine, and it seemed initially there were no problems with the updated code base. However BattleClinic shortly went a little mad with bug reports similar to this one: ...

Having done a little experimenting with Visual Studio Extensions for WSS (VSeWSS), I wanted to start actually developing features for our intranet site. I try and add everything that is even slightly important into source control (Subversion). VSeWSS creates normal looking solutions, however when you deploy your project to a SharePoint site it created an additional directory alongside “bin” and “obj” called “pkg”. This “pkg” folder contains the manifest.xml, soloution.xml and feature.xml files that are used to create the feature to be deployed into SharePoint. Initially I was including this folder in my commits however, I noticed that any tweaks made to feature.xml were overwritten when you deployed the package again. After some searching around I came across an article that suggests deleting the “pkg” folder under certain circumstances. From this I assume that the contents of the “pkg” folder is generated each and every time you package and deploy your solution (or indeed project), thus it does not need to be added to source control. ...

I have had an issue today with Visual Studio 2005 and Vista today, specificly I have been unable to use the built in mini-web server that is used for debugging web projects. When you run a project from within the development environment it starts WebDev.WebServer.exe and then points an instance of Internet Explorer at http://localhost:port/path/to/default.aspx. Now I remember this working well in the past, and indeed if I replace localhost with 127.0.0.1 it worked fine, I didn’t fancy having to type this every time I went to build and run a program. I could not find any way of configuring Visual Studio to point to the IP address rather than the host name. ...