Favorite Visual Studio Add-Ins

Visual Studio is a fantastic tool that can be made even better with judicious selection of Add-Ins. Here are the ones you’ll find currently installed in all my dev environments…

• ReSharper (Absolute must!)
• AgentSmith (ReSharper plugin. Finally, spell-checked comments!)
• GhostDoc (Handy and free.)
• VisualSVN (Integration of TortoiseSVN most used features.)
• SlickEdit Gadgets (Current line indicator, no more searching for the cursor.)

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Best Anti-virus For Software Developers?

As anyone who’s looked into the performance impact of anti-virus software knows, protection from internet STD’s requires the use of parasitic utilities that significantly hinder performance and productivity, yet going without isn’t an option under most IT policies. Thus a question is born, what is the best anti-virus software for developers?

Due to the difficulty in benchmarking the real-world performance impact of AV little empirical data is available beyond “that one felt slow but this one felt faster.” Following is the best resources I’ve found on the topic, to be updated as I uncover more.

• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1305709/slowdown-of-microsoft-visual-studio-due-to-different-virus-scanner
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/111226/least-intrusive-antivirus-software-for-development-pc
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1404999/development-machines-and-anti-virus-policy
• http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/02/choosing-anti-anti-virus-software.html

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Visual Studio 2010 & .NET Framework 4 Release Candidate (RC) Available

Look what I just found…

Today I’m pleased to announce we have shipped the RC for Visual Studio 2010 / .NET Framework 4! MSDN subscribers can download the bits immediately from this location. The RC will be made available to the public on Wednesday February 10.

via Jason Zander’s WebLog : Announcing VS2010 / .NET Framework 4 Release Candidate (RC).

The RC’s include a Go Live license which means they can be used in production. On a closely related note, ReSharper has a nightly build available that supports the new RC’s.

http://confluence.jetbrains.net/display/ReSharper/ReSharper+5.0+Nightly+Builds

Time to make good use of Comcast’s overpriced bandwidth and start the 2.3GB VS2010 Ultimate download!

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Detecting Design-time in C#

Excellent, now I can detect Visual Studio design time anywhere in my code. (Make sure to read the comments, they provide a valuable correction.)

I came across interesting issue with one of our controls. I needed a different behavior during design-time and run-time. I was sure that .NET Framework has a nice solution for me, but I found out this is not the case.There is a DesignMode property but according to several sources it doesn’t always work as expected. There seems to be more that one way to solve the issue. I decided to useSystem.Diagnostics.Process.GetCurrentProcess.ProcessNameand check if it equals string “devenv”. If it does, the instance is running inside Visual Studio, which means it’s design-time for our control. For my problem this simple solution worked as a charm.

via Detecting Design-time in C#.

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.NET 4.0 Beta Breaks WCF Activation

I suppose that’s why it’s a “beta” but I honestly only expected the .NET beta to break itself, not other applications. Here’s a better worded post than I feel like writing that describes the issue…

I’ve had a problem on my most recent Windows 7 install with getting the WCF activation to install. I kept getting errors which told me that an error occurred and some of the features were not installed and then I was prompted to restart now or later… Well, great as that was, I was sort of hoping to find a solution…

via Installing WCF Activation on Windows 7 with VS 2010.

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Visual Studio Post-Build Event Command Line

Just a reminder for myself on how to create a directory and copy a renamed file into it using the post-build event of Visual Studio.

rd /s /q "$(TargetDir)Temp"
md "$(TargetDir)Temp"
copy "$(TargetDir)$(TargetName).exe" "$(TargetDir)Temp"
rename "$(TargetDir)Temp\$(TargetName).exe" "SomeCustomerUsefulName.exe"
copy "$(TargetDir)Temp\SomeCustomerUsefulName.exe" "$(TargetDir)"
rd /s /q "$(TargetDir)Temp"

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Visual Studio 2010 Intellisense Missing? Disappeared?

I was just harshly reminded of the dark ages of software development, a time I only hazily recall as involving black-screened terminals that were constantly loosing, leaking, or not releasing something important, when I just tried to use Visual Studio 2010 only to discover that Intellisense wasn’t working. Not getting any further than “Hello Wo…  {what’s that word again?}” I set about resolving the issue. Some quick searches on Google didn’t turn up much so when in doubt… reboot! Or in this case I reset my Visual Studio settings. Intellisense reappeared, and suddenly I had the vast power of Micro-somebody’s .NET at my fingertips. Back to work! (What was I working on again?)

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Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Beta Download

Somehow I missed the VS 2010 Beta getting released a couple days ago…

It’s the next gen of next-gen applications. Download the Visual Studio 2010 Professional and Team System Betas and see for yourself how they’ve been designed inside and out to give you every advantage in creating groundbreaking applications — faster and easier than ever.

via Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 First Look.

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Setting Up Subversion Externals With TortoiseSVN

Instructions including screenshots for setting the svn:externals property using TortoiseSVN. This allows multiple repositories to be open and used in a single Visual Studio instance using VisualSVN. Slick stuff, so far this is working really well for us.

Just a tip I spent some time on figuring out: Found information today on how to use TortoiseSVN to manage svn:externals. I’m working on a big project where we need many different branches and parts to use the same css and images libraries throughout all subprojects.

via justaddwater.dk | Setting Up Subversion Externals With TortoiseSVN.

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VS2008 AJAX Profiling Extensions

This looks fun, I’d like a chance to give it a go sometime.

Today, the team released Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 AJAX Profiling Extensions – a new power tool to measure the performance of the portions of web applications that execute JavaScript inside the web browser.

VS2008 AJAX Profiling Extensions

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