Contents tagged with Visual Studio
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Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 editor performance fix running on a virtual machine
After I installed Visual Studio 2010 beta 2 (hot off the presses) in a VMWare virtual machine (you don't think I'd be crazy enough to install it on my real machine did you?) I noticed some serious performance problems with the text editor. It was very laggy - couldn't keep up with my typing - and had some visual glitchiness.
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Locating the active item in Solution Explorer
Scott Hanselman tweeted a link to Daniel Cazzulino's blog post about automatically synchronizing the Visual Studio Solution Explorer with the active item open in the editor. It's a great tip, but I personally have never been a fan of the Track Active Item option - I find that it slows down the IDE, causes distracting visuals, and often just isn't the behavior I want. I do, however, often want a way to manually sync up the Solution Explorer with my currently open item.
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Is the Visual Studio 2008 Javascript debugger crippled?
Sadly, it appears the answer is "yes". Specifically, the debugger has a huge limitation - one that's been there since Visual Studio 2005 (maybe even 2003). You can't set a breakpoint on the first line of an anonymous function. Consider, for example, the following:
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Visual Studio install asking for XP SP2 on Vista - the solution
A while back I blogged about a problem I had installing Visual Studio 2005 on a fresh Vista install - it complained about requiring Windows XP SP2. I never found a satisfactory explanation, but copying the DVD contents to the hard drive worked around the problem. The stock suggestion was to check the Compatibility settings on the property page for setup.exe - but in my case no compatibility mode was set. Or was it?
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Unable to install Visual Studio 2005 on Windows Vista
I've got a brand-spanking new, clean install of Vista on my laptop, and I'm trying to install Visual Studio 2005 on it. Unfortunately, I'm not getting very far. The installer always displays the following dialog, complaining that I don't have XP SP 2 installed:
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Visual Studio 2005 oopsie
I was working in Visual Studio 2005 the other day, and noticed something in a dialog box that I’ve seen a hundred (maybe a thousand) times before, and never noticed. It was in the “Add New Item” dialog:
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Absolute positioning in VS2005 HTML designer
In Visual Studio .NET 2003, ASPX pages included a property called pageLayout, which defaulted to “GridLayout” – essentially, CSS absolute positioning for all form elements. Although this is a horrible idea in a production application (I assume MS did it to make it easier to demo rapid application building), it does turn out to have a handy use – it makes it easy to quickly sketch out web forms for UI design or prototyping.
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Visual SourceSafe - recursive handling bug from command line
In case anyone else bangs their head against this – in SourceSafe, there seems to be a bug in recursive file handling using the command line tools. I tried performing a recursive checkout using a specific filename (AssemblyInfo.cs, in this case), but SourceSafe claimed to not find any matching files. However, if I specify a wildcard character (AssemblyInfo*.cs), it works as expected (although it wouldn’t be exactly the right behavior if I had an AssemblyInfo2.cs file). In other words, this:
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SourceSafe 2005 - Getting back the old-style dialogs
Here’s a tip for those poor suckers (like me) who are still stuck using Visual SourceSafe. With SourceSafe 2005 Microsoft tried to clean up some of the ugly UI aspects that carried over from previous versions. In particular, a couple of the old, non-resizeable dialogs were totally replaced with shiny new models.
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Uh-oh - TestDriven.NET goes commercial
Today Jamie Cansdale announced big news - TestDriven.NET is now a commercial product. Although not a huge surprise (signs have been there for a while), this change may very well have some serious repercussions. I know a lot of developers (including me) have TD.NET deeply embedded in their development process. Being suddenly asked to pay for this tool is kind of like - well, kind of like being asked to suddenly pay for NUnit.
I don't begrudge Jamie's right to try to turn what has obviously become a major time investment for him into a money-making venture. I do, however, think this change is going to complicate a lot of people's lives. Anyone who lives in budget-constrained enterprise where ordering software is like pulling teeth (a lot of people, I suspect) is now going to have to justify a new purchase.
My big question about the change is this - what about people already using it? Are they now suddenly software pirates? I know that Jamie still has a free "personal" license, but that only supports "trial users, students and open source developers" - not your average joe professional developer.
I do wish Jamie luck in his new venture. But in the end I wonder if he's already been too successful - he may have gotten so many people hooked on integrated unit testing that an open-source competitor may soon spring up. Anyone from the NUnit team out there? :)