When installing SQL Server 2008 R2 on a Windows XP (or, according to the comments, Windows 7) development machine that has been around for quite some time, I got an error stating an unhandled exception occured in the application (see image). The error showed up directly upon startup and read:
When writing WCF services, most of us find ourselves writing quick test applications. To give you more time to do what a developer should be doing (adding business value to the project) the Visual Studio team added a WCF test client that can help you reach goals faster.
Saving a file from Silverlight using the SaveFileDialog, added in Silverlight 3, is easy. If you’re used to desktop development however, you might find yourself getting a SecurityException with the message ‘File operation not permitted. Access to path ‘xxx’ is denied.’. Here’s why:
Here’s a quick Visual Studio tip for you…
I frequently search for a specific text in my solution because I need to do something in all places where that text occurs. Today I found out how you can open all the files that are mentioned in the Find Results window.
Just a small post to start the new year… and let it be a good one!
When opening a XAML document in Visual Studio, it opens in split view by default. This might become annoying when you have a large XAML document, because all the content needs to be rendered before you can get some work done.
Although the feature has been around since ASP.NET 2.0, I still meet people that don’t know and/or use app_offline.htm. Do you know (and use) the feature…?
When working on an ASP.NET web application, you should notify your visitors in a decent way that your application is down. There’s a nice default feature available for these purposes since ASP.NET 2.0. Somehow, however, this feature is not very well known and rarely used. The App_Offline.htm feature in ASP.NET 2.0 provides an easy way to bring down an ASP.NET application while you make changes to it. This feature kicks in as soon as you place a file called app_offline.htm in the root of the application. When ASP.NET detects the file, it will shut-down the app-domain for the application and won’t restart it for requests. The app_offline.htm file will be sent as the response to all new dynamic requests for the application. When you’re done updating the site, just delete or rename the file and your site it will come back online.
Because we were still using an old Visual Studio 2005 solution which included a Web Site project, it was time to upgrade. We upgraded our Visual Studio 2005 solution to Visual Studio 2010 (and .NET 4.0), converted the Web Site Project to a Web Application Project and then, of course, the AjaxControlToolkit had to follow. I downloaded the latest build from their Codeplex site and updated the references in the different projects. I ran the website, and that’s where things got ugly …
Yesterday I remembered two Visual Studio options Sara Ford told about in a presentation of her I attended a while back. Changing them made me happy… 🙂
When I have to test something real quick, I tend to create a new project in Visual Studio and scribble some code to test whatever I want to test at that point. This causes my project directory to be filled with projects named WindowsFormsApplication14 or something like that. To make this stop, go to Tools - Options - Projects and Solutions - General. Uncheck the option ‘Save new projects when created’. This way those newly made (and shortly used) projects aren’t saved untill you explicitly tell Visual Studio to do so. No more WindowsFormsApplication63 for you! Unless you want to name it that way intentionally, of course…
While working with Visual Studio 2010, a new feature caught my eye that isn’t communicated (strongly) in the “What’s new” lists you can find online. As part of the Visual Studio 2010 supports multiple web.config files! Now we can create a separate web.config file for each configuration we have for our application. If you add a configuration through the configuration manager, you have the possibility to add a web.config file for the new configuration, too.
Thanks to our friends at Microsoft (and their great BizSpark program) I will be able to attend DevDays ‘09! We won tickets because we updated our company profile and added projects at the Discover Metro site. Normally attending this kind of event is not available to young startups like ours, but now it is!
I just read this great article by Mark Voermans: Expression Web SuperPreview: Look how your site renders in various Browsers.
I don’t know about you guys, but I’ve been waiting for this for a long, LONG time. I’ll give it a go this afternoon and let you know what I think…
I just read an interesting article on Bertrand Le Roy’s blog. The most important information:
It so happens that the menu control is making a bad assumption on what the default value for z-index should be. We debated this at length with the IE team, but it became clear as we did so that they were right and that we were wrong. We had to fix that.