Visual Studio

We’re hosting a VS2019 Launch Event at the Betabit The Hague office. Join us for some Visual Studio 2019 goodness! And maybe even some swag… ? Join us on April 2 for the launch of Visual Studio 2019. Learn about how Visual Studio 2019 is more productive, modern, and innovative, participate in live Q&As, and be the first to take the latest version for a spin. https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs2019-launch/ The agenda is as follows:

The people over at Microsoft have been working hard and have delivered a lot of stuff. That makes for a nice start after the holidays! So there’s a lot of cool stuff available to play with. I created some simple and easy to remember links for all of these goodies. Feel free to use and distribute these 🙂 Links to the goodies! The spec for .NET Standard 2.0 is complete (https://bit.

As the title states: I was unable to attach the remote debugger (for instance to an Azure Web App) after installing Visual Studio 2015 Update 2. I got an error with something about invalid memory access or something like that. The solution is simple: install Remote Tools for Visual Studio 2015 Update 2. Go to the webite, pick your machine’s architecture (the x86 install won’t run on a x64 machine) and click download.

After updating Visual Studio 2015 (there was an update for GitHub Extensions, one for the NuGet Package Manager and, of course, there was Visual Studio 2015 Update 2) I tried to add the WindowsAzure.Storage NuGet package to a project I started about a month ago. I opened NuGet Package Manager, went to the Browse tab and typed WindowsAzure.Storage. The result: No Packages Found. OK, so then I’ll just…. Wait… WHAT?

After making sure my Visual Studio always ran as an administrator by following my own post HowTo: Have Visual Studio always run as administrator on Windows 8, I got a message if I wanted to save changes to devenv.sln each and every time I double clicked a Solution. Since the problem kept occuring after installing Visual Studio 2015 CTP6, I wanted to solve it. So here we go! Double clicking a Solution file doesn’t start devenv.

Last week I received my Intel Galileo board (windowsondevices.com) and I started ~playing with~ developing for it yesterday. I created a first test project, but it didn’t run. Visual Studio couldn’t find the Arduino header file, which was probably due to a missing NuGet package (the Galileo C++ SDK). I tried to save the project, because you need to before you can manage NuGet packages, but to no avail. Visual Studio served me a ‘The operation could not be completed’ error without any additional information.

When you have more than one Microsoft Account that you use regularly, you might recognize the scenario where your Visual Studio keeps you signed in to Visual Studio Online… with the wrong account. You keep getting messages that you don’t have access rights. Restarting Visual Studio, rebooting and even clearing all (Visual Studio) cookies doesn’t help. Here’s a quick fix: Open Visual Studio Open the Visual Studio web browser (under View, Other Windows, Web Browser) Go to Visual Studio Online Click sign out You should be good to go now!

Just a quick little post today: I got the error “The Path ‘path’ is already mapped in workspace ‘workspace’” when I connected to a new Team Foundation Server and tried to map my workspace today. I had connected to a Team Foundation Services project a while back to get some shared code, but I already removed the workspace and the server binding. Even though Visual Studio didn’t see any other bindings, mapping my workspace to the same folder the previous TFS binding was mapped to served me this error.

A rather long title for this post, but that’s exactly what happened: when I opened an ASP.NET MVC 4 project with a cshtml view open, Visual Studio would crash with the error messages seen on the right. This would only occur if the first project I opened had a cshtml file open. When I opened another (type of) project first and then opened a project with a cshtml file open, the problem did not occur.

When debugging JavaScript in an ASP.NET MVC (4) application, it is not always enough to uncheck the ‘Disable script debugging’ checkboxes under ‘Tools’ – ‘Internet Options’ – ‘Advanced’ – ‘Browsing’. JavaScript inside a Razor view (a cshtml file) cannot be debugged from Visual Studio. To debug your JavaScript, move it to a separate .js file and link to that file from your Razor view. This way, breakpoints set in the JavaScript will be hit and you can debug from Visual Studio.

In the past, when you had some XML document that you wanted to translate into classes we had to create / generate a schema based on the XML file. Next, we had to generate a class based on the schema with an external tool. Not all too user friendly and somewhat time consuming. In Visual Studio 2012 you copy the XML you want to create a class/classes for, place the cursor in a class file on the location you want the code to be added and select the following menu items: Edit – Paste Special – Paste XML as Classes.

My Microsoft Touch Mouse stopped scrolling in Visual Studio on my Windows 8 machine some time ago. Because this kills productivity, I wanted to fix the problem. After trying some things I found that the problem only occurred when I ran Visual Studio as Administrator. Searching a bit further I found this bug to be added to Microsoft Connect. I found a workaround for the problem: Go to the location where you have Microsoft Mouse and Keyboard Center installed Open up the properties of ipoint.

In my previous post about being unable to access the iis metabase I wanted my Visual Studio to ‘Run as Administrator’ on my Windows 8 machine. I only managed to get this working for the pinned taskbar icon and not for items in the jumplist or for items you open by double clicking them. The solution to check the box ‘Run as Administrator’ on the compatibility tab of the file properties for devenv.

I opened a solution in Visual Studio 2012 on my laptop running Windows 8, when I was presented with the error “The Web Application Project SomeWebProject is configured to use IIS. Unable to access the IIS metabase. You do not have sufficient privilege to access IIS web sites on your machine.” The user I was logged in with was a local administrator and was able to open up and use IIS Manager, but still I was presented with this error.

When installing the Windows Azure AppFabric Tools for Visual Studio (found here), you might get the error message shown at the top, stating that Windows Server AppFabric is installed and that it is not compatible with this release of Windows Azure AppFabric Developer Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 – June 2011 CTP. It asks to uninstall Windows Server AppFabric and rerun this setup if you want to install Windows Azure AppFabric Developer Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 – June 2011 CTP.

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. This is not a very difficult application, but it does the trick and is more than sufficient for simple testing. The WCF Test Client can be found at this location (without the ‘ (x86)’ for x86 machines): C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft\Visual Studio 10.

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. Search for the text you’re looking for. In my case this is ITest*. Open up the Search Results window and select all the records where the text was found.

The past couple of days I’ve been experiencing some issues with the context menu for my Solution Explorer in Visual Studio 2010. It contained scrollbars even when there was sufficient space on the screen to show the menu without scrolling. Searching for that issue I immediately found this blog post on The Visual Studio Blog. Taken from that post: We’re pleased to announce that there are patches available for Visual Studio and Windows Presentation Foundation that fix this problem.

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. Here’s how you can have Visual Studio open XAML documents in code view:

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… 🙂 Zero-impact projects 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.

Sometimes it’s the little things that make you love a new product just a bit more. I tend to close stuff I don’t use anymore fairly quickly. Sometimes I even close an Explorer window or an application right after I used it, only to find I need it again in a few moments… We all have our quirks, right 😉 While developing I regularly close all the documents I have open in Visual Studio, especially when I am done with a specific task.

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.

After installing Windows 7 and Visual Studio 2010 on my laptop, I ran into the well-known message “The project location is not trusted”. I thought all I had to do was follow the instructions in this MSDN article to get my development share to be trusted again, but this doesn’t seem to work. I already tried adding the new child group under the Internet_Zone in stead of the LocalIntranet_Zone, and using the complete server name and the server IP address in stead of the name of the server.

When trying to pass some command line arguments to a Console Application, I got the following message: “The current project settings specify that the project will be debugged with specific security permissions. In this mode, command line arguments will not be passed to the executable. Do you want to continue debugging anyway?” (see image) I didn’t run in to this earlier, but yesterday it suddenly popped up. But I did change my zone security, so that might be of some influence… Apparently, this is because of the Debug in Zone settings you can find at the Security tab of your project properties.

I’m reinstalling my laptop after I got it back from a repair… EMPTY (grrr). What tools shouldn’t I forget when preparing this laptop to be my development machine? Already have Visual Studio, SQL Management Studio, Office and the Windows Live tools installed… (and of course I have all kinds of tools at hand from my server like DebugView, Reflector and whatnot)

I’ve had my current installation for a few months now, and I’ve used it for development purposes. Today I suddenly encountered an error when trying to add items to the Toolbox. Visual Studio 2008 simply disappeared… No errors, no warnings, it just went away. After some searching and a lot of trying, I found that deinstalling the PowerCommands for Visual Studio 2008 did the trick. I’m guessing that the installation of a service pack (for either Visual Studio or .

Scott Guthrie posted about a cool new ASP.NET server control: Chart. It can be used for free with ASP.NET 3.5 to enable rich browser-based charting scenarios. Read more over here: https://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2008/11/24/new-asp-net-charting-control-lt-asp-chart-runat-quot-server-quot-gt.aspx

Because I stopped working at Avanadeand started my own company(this web site is under construction and in Dutch), I had to buy and install a new laptop. Everything went great and I was up and running in half a day. Or should I say half an evening… 😉 The next day I wanted to continue developing a web site we are working on. I needed one of the Ajax Control Toolkit controls, so I added it to my toolbar the way you should go about this (create a separate tab, right click, ‘choose items’, browse for the assembly).

StyleCop version 4.3 was released last tuesday. A short summary of what version 4.3 brings us:  Various bugfixes, including fixes for VS integration issues Rules documentation is included and integrated into VS “Show Error Help” New rules, see blogpostfor the rules Branding change from Source Analysis to StyleCop **Links ** StyleCop blog: https://blogs.msdn.com/sourceanalysis/ Release announcement on the StyleCop blog: https://blogs.msdn.com/sourceanalysis/archive/2008/08/19/stylecop-4-3-is-released.aspx StyleCop 4.3 download: https://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ProjectName=sourceanalysis&ReleaseId=1425

Taken from the SysInternals website: The SysInternals web site was created in 1996 by Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell to host their advanced system utilities and technical information. Microsoft acquired Sysinternals in July, 2006. Whether you’re an IT Pro or a developer, you’ll find Sysinternals utilities to help you manage, troubleshoot and diagnose your Windows systems and applications. One of the must-have SysInternals tools for a developer is DebugView.

When you want to implement a custom stsadm for SharePoint, all you realy have to do is implement the Microsoft.SharePoint.StsAdmin.ISPStsadmCommand interface. Because I develop on a machine with no SharePoint installed, I (only) copy the assemblies I need to develop locally. For the stsadm command I was working on recently (more on this in a future post) I only needed the Microsoft.SharePoint and Microsoft.Office.Server assemblies. Or at least I thought so…

While writing a custom stsadm command for SharePoint (more on that in a future post) and having to do something based on the command the user typed in, I used ToLower(CultureInfo.InvariantCulture) on the command string to be able to check without the hassle of differences in casing. When I ran code analysis on my project, I got this somewhat cryptic message: CA1308 : Microsoft.Globalization : In method ‘CommandParser.Run(string, StringDictionary, out string)’, replace the call to ‘string.

While developing a web application for a friend of mine, I ran into a Visual Studio error message I hadn’t seen before: Error connecting to undo manager of source file ‘D:DevelopmentSomeWeb ApplicationDefault.master.designer.cs’. The error occured whenever I tried to start the (web) application in debug mode. The application did start OK after the error message though. Starting the application without debugging didn’t cause the error. I closed the solution file I had opened, but that didn’t solve the issue.

When roaming the MSDN forumsfor unanswered questions for me to answer, I come across a lot of questions about any of the following: Intellisense acting weird Intellisense not showing up at all Menu items that are all garbled up Missing buttons on toolbars Complete toolbars missing Keyboard shortcuts acting weird Keyboard shortcuts not working at all … In most cases, resetting the Visual Studio settings to the default settings using devenv /resetsettingssolves any problems that are in that list.

We probably all worked with dynamically generated controls on forms, ASP.NET pages or (user) controls. And I guess we’ve all written for-each statements to loop through the ControlCollection and filter out all the controls of a specific type, right? I wanted to do the same today, so I started by trying to use LINQ for this: This, as you can see, generated a compile time error: Could not find an implementation of the query pattern for source type ‘System.

The error I’m getting when setting up an OleDB connection to an Access database* via the Server Explorer in Visual Studio 2008 is ‘Format of the initialization string does not conform to specification starting at index 0’. The screen doesn’t display the way it should be displayed, as you can see in the screenshot on the left. There is a possible fix at svenM’s blog(it’s about checking the existence of a key in the registry called ‘ProgID’ and the default value, as you can read in this article), but this doesn’t seem to work for my situation.

As a reaction to this articleat Peter Ritchie’s MVP Blog, I thought I’d give my two cents on having a single exit point for methods. Here we go… When writing code, I always create only one exit point except for the occasional throwing of an exception. Most important for me is to always know where your code (really) stops. In case of long and complex methods there’s a chance you’re going to miss a return statement when scanning through a method.

One of the most annoying things in Visual Studio (to me) was the fact that complete solutions (solution folders, projects, regulare folder) would be expanded upon opening. And with big solutions, that isn’t too much fun. There are macros available online, but the ones i found were pretty slow. This is only one of the things that the PowerCommands for Visual Studio 2008 solves for you. But there is more. Much more!

With the official release of Visual Studio 2008 coming closer and its release on MSDN last november, there are more and more people asking what the impact of migrating from VS2005 to VS2008 will be and if it will have as big an impact as switching from VS2003 to VS2005 had. The answer is pretty simple: no it won’t. Let’s see why, and what impact it will have. VS2003 > VS2005

As stated on ScottGu’s blog{.} in his latest post{.}, the .NET Framework Library Source Code is now available. A detailed blog post about the steps to follow to enable .NET Framework source access in Visual Studio 2008 can be found at Shawn Burke’s blog in this post{.}. Taken from Scott’s post: Once you follow the configuration steps in Shawn’s post above, you’ll be able to dynamically load the debug symbols for .

The last weeks have been filled with holidays and introductional days at my new employer{.}. Because of that, I haven’t had the time to realy dive into Visual Studio 2008, although I have played around with it since the RTM version was available. Since this week I’ve been writing some serious code in VS2008 for my new personal site (more about this later!). I can only agree with what Pieter de Bruinsaid in his post about the new line of developer tools and additions: “If you are building .

Next to the message in the subject, one of the symptoms we encountered is that although the solution contains some test projects the ‘Create private accessor’ menu has disappeared. Also, selecting ‘Create unit tests…’ produces an error. And when editing a testrun config and selecting the ‘Code coverage’ option, the settings dialog simply closes, without any message. All these (and probably more) symptoms can occur because of a corrupt solution file.

At my current project we made a project template for Visual Studio for our testers. We added all the references, folders and files a tester needs to add a new system tests project. One of the testers (!) extended our XML generator, which generated XML testcases based on data entered in Excel, to now generate a complete C# test class. Making (system) tests which are automatically run during the nightly build now really is just as simple as entering data in Excel.

I have lots of games for my Xbox 360 I still need to / want to finish, like The Orange Box and Bioshock. And despite this, I’ve been working ’non-stop’ behind my laptop for the last two evenings to prepare it for Visual Studio 2008, and to download and install it. It’s almost time… 😉 I can’t wait to get busy with the final version of Visual Studio 2008 and stuff like LINQ, extension methods, anonymous types, lambda expressions and so on.

Have you ever made an install for your application with Visual Studio and sent it out into the world, only to get complaints of people that your software wouldn’t run? “Have you got the Microsoft .NET framework installed?” “The what?” “Go look in control panel, …… ……” “Ow, yeah, I got that” “Hmmm….” “So ehm….” “What version is it?” “Version? …. wait …. it’s 1.0” “Darn, download it and …”

We recently ran into the problem mentioned in the title of this post at work. Microsoft has a knowledgebase article (kbid 842706) for this bug. The hotfix is not to be distributed freely, but I already spoke to some people who have contacted Microsoft and got the fix for free. It will be e-mailed to you. As you can read in the comments of this post at dotnetjunkies, there are some people who found no more problems after installing hotfixes KB841870 and KB841767-X86… I think that’s weird (but I’m not arguing!

The last couple of years I’ve had small Visual Studio crashes, where Visual Studio stopped and asked me if I wanted to restart and reopen the current project. These crashes never meant a loss of work. Today I had the first BIG VS2K3 crash and this time it did cost me. A lot… I’m wondering why VS stopped responding completely. The network here at our client isn’t that fast this morning, but I can not imagine this being the problem.