In addition to Visual Studio Links, I will also write articles on Visual Studio periodically so make sure to subscribe to the rss feed.

For those who subscribe to this site, or visit often, I will still post entries here that are more general .Net programming topics.

Tags: visualstudiolinks, visualstudio, dotnet

Vishal Joshi posted an overview of the VS tooling integration that shipped with ASP.NET MVC last week.

Marlon Grech discusses how to add Input Prompt support in Vista with WPF using Avalon Controls Library.

Via Steve Pietrek: Letz Roeder has released version 5.1 of .NET Reflector.

Via Jason Haley:  Creating a Debugger Visualizer for Graphics instances on Code Project.  Source included, of coarse.

Via email from Ted Heuer:  ILog has released an open source java to C# translater that can handle generic types.  According to ILog, this is used internally to help port their java rules engine product to .Net.  It is also available as an Eclipse plug-in that can take an Eclipse project and generate a VS project.

Alessandro Del Sole has written an article on Code Project explaining how to Use WPF Controls in VSTO Solutions with Visual Basic 2008.

Keyvan Nayyeri has released Visual Studio Extensibility.  The book covers VS 2008.  As of when I am writing this post, a quick search revealed that Amazon has the book for $2 cheaper than B&N, even with a B&N membership.  Both are still showing the book as pre-release but Keyvan says that should be corrected very soon and Wrox should have it for purchase immediately.  From the posted table of contents, information that I have not seen covered in other books on VS Extensions include: 

• Debugging and Testing Add-Ins
• Creating a Windows Installer for your Add-In (where was this when I needed it?)
• Localization
• VS Shell, which is new to 2008 so it could not have appeared in previous books
• DSL Tools, also new
• Extending the debugger
• VSPackages
• MSBuild

Sara Ford explains how to turn off the prompting to rename your classes when you rename the files in Visual Studio.  With this option turned off, the renaming happens automatically without the prompt.

Carlos Quintero pointed out an excellent set of posts dedicated to learning the VS SDK.

Tags: visualstudio, visualstudiolinks, dotnet

Carlos Quintero posted an excellent summary of resolving Type instances and information from within VS.

This is a nice post on how to incorporate the Subersion revision number in to the assemblyinfo version number when building.

Alexander Brutt posted a VS 2005 project template for creating Sharepoint 2007 Timer Jobs (scheduled tasks that run under Sharepoint).  The post also includes a link that explains how to create the actual timer jobs.

The WPF Controls library, Avalon Controls Library on Codeplex, has been updated to v2.

Via DotNetKicks, Windows Vista Controls for .Net version 1.3 released.  This is a .Net control library for VS 2008 and windows vista, hosted on CodePlex.

Sara Ford posted a tip on how to stop the toolbox from auto-populating items in your solution.  She suggests that this could speed up load time for solutions containing large projects.

The sessions from the recent Mix conference have been posted here.  Sessions on ASP.NET MVC and Silverlight 2.0 are included along with many other topics.

Haibo Luo has updated his ILVisualizer debugger visualizer for 2008.  This visualizer will show the IL for methods you are debugging.  Source code included.

Good stuff from Channel9:

• Scott Guthrie discusses Silverlight 2.0 Beta 1.
• The Silverlight Blueprint for Sharepoint
• Inside IE8 Beta 1 For Developers
• Tips and Tricks with the Interop Forms Toolkit

Tags: visualstudio, visualstudiolinks, dotnet

The February 29 episode of This Week on Channel 9 discusses a few interesting Visual Studio items:  Extensibility videos are discussed.  The upcoming release of XNA Studio will support game development on the Zune device – debugging, performance tools, and all the normal goodness will be fully supported.  VSTO Power Toys released.

Script# was one of the pick of the week items for Channel 9 for the Feb 22 episode.  Script# compiles C# to javascript. 

Sara Ford shows how to jump to the Visual Studio command line in one of her tip of the day posts.

Terry Clancy posted new links to the VSIP site that give listings of partner products for Requirements Management, Secure Application Development, and Cross-Platform Development.

Via Jason Haley:  David Vidmar shows how to select a string, including surrounding quotes, from within a VS add-in.  This code could pretty easily be put in a macro.

Roberto Alexis Farah posted some WinDbg goodness – Using ~, the Thread Identifier.

As previously discussed, Microsoft released Preview 2 of ASP.NET MVC and Silverlight 2 Beta 1 at Mix.  Busy day for ScottGu’s group.

Scott Hanselman posted 4 screencasts demonstrating the usage of ASP.NET MVC Preview 2.

Carlos Quintero posted an article explaining how to programmatically add an event handler to a WinForm control from within a VS Add-in.

Tags: visualstudiolinks, dotnet, visualstudio

Jason Kresowaty has done a lot of work putting together a good overview of writing your own custom FxCop rules.  His tutorial covers the current 1.36 beta.

Carlos Quintero has added two good posts to his blog on VS Extensibility.  The first is an explanation of how to tell that a project is in debug or release configuration.   Carlos explains the differences between C# and VB.Net projects in this respect as well.   The second is how to execute a build for all projects in a solution from within a macro or add-in.

The VS Code Analysis Team explained how to turn off FxCop checking for generated code.  This is specific to the new 1.36 version.

This is not really related to VS, but cool nonetheless.  The Sysinternals team has updated Process Explorer.  Process Explorer is like windows task manager on steroids. Via Steve Pietrek.

Scott Guthrie shows the new support in Expression Blend for Silverlight 2.0.  Tutorial goodness.

The Windows SDK Team Blog has a discussion of how to integrate the SDK with Visual Studio 2008 using the new SDK Configuration Tool.

The VS Extensibility Team has released PowerCommands for Visual Studio 2008.  The tool adds new menu items in various places in Visual Studio.  The Visual Studio Gallery video on Channel 9 has a brief demo of this tool at the end.

Via Jason Haley, here is an interesting post about Authenticode signing assemblies and what the framework does with those assemblies.  Speaking of Authenticode, I recently had to go through the process of buying my own certificate and Andy Brice recently posted about certificate authorities and the cost of certificates.  His post hit home in a lot of areas and was humorous in others.  For full disclosure purposes, I went with Comodo for my cert.

VS Knowledge Base stuff:

• Visual Studio 2005 can break hard links to files when you edit them.
• ERROR_CODE: (NTSTATUS) 0xe06d7363 – <Unable to get error code text> – may mean a corrupt .Net install.
• You can get trace output on a machine where VS is not installed.
• Many fixes available for Visual Studio 2005 Team System Database Professional.
• VS 2005 may crash when compiling a large VB project.
• When a project is on a mapped drive, Edit and Continue does not work.

Tags: visualstudio, visualstudiolinks, dotnet

Aaron Marten posted a brief sample of creating a VSPackage with F#.

Quan To announced that Visual Studio Gallery is live.  Visual Studio Gallery is a one stop shop to find out about extensions to Visual Studio.  I will be adding my product shortly.

Aaron Marten announced that a few Channel 9 videos are available discussing VSX and the Visual Studio Gallery.

Sara Ford discussed the multi-targeting capability in VS 2008 on her tip of the day.

Tags: visualstudio, visualstudiolinks, dotnet

Aaron Marten explains how to work around a painting bug in the VS 2008 SDK Browser.

Aaron also posted a link to a talk he participated in about integrating new languages into VS.

Here are links to Visual Studio 2008 Key Bindings posters for C# and VB.net.

Sara Ford posted a tip on how you can hide projects in the VS Solution Explorer.

Scott Guthrie announced that the first beta release of Silverlight 2.0 is coming soon and gave an overview of what is included.

Jason Zander posted a link to videos from the last Lang.Net Symposium.

Robert Pickering has added F# integration into the latest beta of SharpDevelop.  SharpDevelop is an open source IDE for .Net.

If you are using SourceSafe with Visual Studio, this is a KB article on diagnosing hanging and general slowness in the IDE.  If you are not using SourceSafe, you are already ahead of the game.

Here is a Microsoft KB article on tools to monitor StackOverflowException problems.

The CodeKeep Visual Studio AddIn now works with 2008.  CodeKeep allows you to keep track of code snippets from within VS.

Visual Studio Team System Management Model Designer Power Tool – February 2008 Technology Preview is now available at the Microsoft Download Center.  Winner of the longest product name award.

The Windows SDK team posted a blog entry on how to use the Windows SDK with Visual C++ 2008 express.

The Windows SDK team posted a workaround for users reporting a problem where xaml intellisence quits working in VS 2008 after the SDK is installed.

From Jason Haley’s blog:  Johan Straarup has posted a good summary of the process he goes through to debug a memory leak in code running under IIS6.

Tags: visualstudio, dotnet, visualstudiolinks

.NET Mass Downloader 1.2 introduces the ability to work behind a proxy server.  The post points to an article on CodePlex that shows how to get this working with VS.net Express as well.

Visual Studio Extensions for Windows Sharepoint Services 1.1 has been released.  Currently for 2005 only but 2008 should be coming this summer.

Visual Studio Team System 2008 Database Edition Power Tools has been released.

As previously mentioned, JetBrains has started the EAP for ReSharper 4.0. 

This is a good article on How to Submit Problems or Bugs to Microsoft about VS that discusses alternatives to opening a case with support.

John Robbins discussed the new version of SOSEX that has been released.  SOSEX, written by Steve Johnson,  provides useful extensions to WinDBG.  Anyone who uses WinDBG quite a bit should look at this.  John’s post also points to his prior description of SOSEX, which is a good read as well.

The Visual Web Developer team blog has an overview of the tooling that will be accompanying the next release of ASP.net MVC.

Nannette Thacker discusses the installation of the Ajax Control Toolkit in VS.

The Visual Web Developer team shows how to get Javascript Intellisense working with jQuery.

Maarten Balliauw shows how to use performance analysis tools in VS 2008.

ScottGu pointed out Charlie Calvert’s blog post on the Expression Tree Visualizer for LINQ.  This is very cool and is actually one of the online samples for C# in VS 2008.  I had missed this one.

Bart De Smet posted a good explanation of creating and debugging custom MSBuild tasks.

Pablo Galiano posted that a new version of the Guidance Automation Extensions has been released and now supports VS 2005 and 2008.  Software Factory goodness for the masses.

Scott Guthrie speaks on the .Net 3.5 Client Product Roadmap here.  Improved .Net Framework Setup integration with 3rd party setup products and improved cold start times are my favorites.

Not really VS specific but here is a good article on monitoring IIS application pool restarts.

If you are a college student, look here to find out how to get VS 2008 for free.

Quan To posted a few links to articles on migrating Visual Studio packages from 2005 to 2008.

Tags: visualstudio, .net, dotnet, visualstudiolinks

Koen Verheyen created a macro for optionally attaching debugger to IIS or the web server that ships with Visual Studio.  Quite handy.

Sara Ford does a VS tip of the day.  Today’s tip was about type-ahead selection in Solution Explorer.  My favorite tip so far is that ctrl+tab brings up the IDE Navigator.  This works in 2005 and 2008 but the window is much better in 2008.  If you keep the ctrl button pressed, you can navigate among the editor windows.  The arrow keys bring you to the tool windows.  Combine the IDE Navigator with today’s tip and keyboard enthusiasts can open new files in the solution without touching the mouse.

Keyvan Nayyeri is releasing a new book on Visual Studio Extensibility, a topic near and dear to my heart.  This book covers 2008 and looks good from what I have seen so far.  It looks like it will be out next month.

Shawn Burke posted a good explanation of setting up 2008 for debugging .Net framework source code.

Scott Guthrie explained the new hot-fix rollup for 2008 web development.  BTW – congats to Scott on his promotion to VP.

Tags: VisualStudio, thisweekinvsdotnet

MSDN Code Gallery is a new site that was introduced by Microsoft.  The site already has many good examples and pointers to good information.  It looks strikingly similar to CodePlex, only not so green.  I am not sure why these sites needed to be separate but I am sure someone has a good reason.

Scott Hanselman has put up a post with various VS themes.  It has become very fashionable to show off your custom themes lately.  I sort of like the Jedi Scheme.  The name is certainly a can’t miss.

Microsoft has just released a CTP version of the new XSLT Profiler for VS 2008.  My recent tribulations with debugging xslt have given me a huge appreciation for tools in this area.

Tags: VisualStudio, addins