Contents tagged with Visual Studio
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How to create a new WCF/MVC/jQuery application from scratch
As a corporate developer by trade, I don't get much opportunity to create from-the-ground-up web sites; usually it's tweaks, fixes, and new functionality to existing sites. And with hobby sites, I often don't find the challenges I run into with enterprise systems; usually it's starting from Visual Studio's boilerplate project and adding whatever functionality I want to play around with, rarely deploying outside my own machine. So my experience creating a new enterprise-level site was a bit dated, and the technologies to do so have come a long way, and are much more ready to go out of the box. My intention with this post isn't so much to provide any groundbreaking insights, but to just tie together a lot of information in one place to make it easy to create a new site from scratch.
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Oracle 64-bit assembly throws BadImageFormatException when running unit tests
We recently upgraded to the 64-bit Oracle client. Since then, Visual Studio 2010 unit tests that hit the database (I know, unit tests shouldn't hit the database--they're not perfect) all fail with this error message:
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MVC 4 and the App_Start folder
I've been delving into ASP.NET MVC 4 a little since its release last month. One thing I was chomping at the bit to explore was its bundling and minification functionality, for which I'd previously used Cassette, and been fairly happy with it. MVC 4's functionality seems very similar to Cassette's; the latter's CassetteConfiguration class matches the former's BundleConfig class, specified in a new directory called App_Start.
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Unity throws SynchronizationLockException while debugging
I've found Unity to be a great resource for writing unit-testable code, and tests targeting it. Sadly, not all those unit tests work perfectly the first time (TDD notwithstanding), and sometimes it's not even immediately apparent why they're failing. So I use Visual Studio's debugger. I then see SynchronizationLockExceptions thrown by Unity calls, when I never did while running the code without debugging. I hit F5 to continue past these distractions, the line that had the exception appears to have completed normally, and I continue on to what I was trying to debug in the first place.
In settings where Unity isn't used extensively, this is just one amongst a handful of annoyances in a tool (Visual Studio) that overall makes my work life much, much easier and more enjoyable. But in larger projects, it can be maddening. Finally it bugged me enough where it was worth researching it. -
Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) and things I wish were more intuitive
I've started using Windows Workflow Foundation, and so far ran into a few things that aren't incredibly obvious. Microsoft did a good job of providing a ton of samples, which is handy because you need them to get anywhere with WF. The docs are thin, so I've been bouncing between samples and downloadable labs to figure out how to implement various activities in a workflow.
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Migrating from VS 2005 to VS 2008
I recently helped migrate a ton of code from Visual Studio 2005 to 2008, and .NET 2.0 to 3.5. Most of it went very smoothly; it touches every .sln, .csproj, and .Designer.cs file, and puts a bunch of junk in Web.Configs, but rarely encountered errors. One thing I didn't expect was that even for a project running in VS 2008 but targeting .NET Framework 2.0, it will still use the v3.5 C# compiler. As such, it does behave a bit differently than the 2.0 compiler, even when targeting the 2.0 Framework.
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TFS deleted files still show up in Source Control Explorer
One problem I've had in Team Foundation Server since Visual Studio 2005 and still in VS 2008 is when items are deleted by someone else, they still show up in Source Control Explorer, with a gray folder with a red X icon, even with "Show deleted items in the Source Control Explorer" unchecked in VS's Options dialog. Sometimes getting latest of the parent clears things up, but other times it doesn't, even with Get Specific Version with both Overwrite boxes checked to force a get. In this case, the only option I've found is to delete my workspace and recreate it, which means checking in everything beforehand, and getting latest of my working branches afterwards. It's a pain, but as specified here and approved by a Microsoft employee, that may be your only option until it's fixed--fingers crossed for VS 2010. (We won't get into the other things for which my fingers have been crossed since I first used TFS in 2005, things that VSS did just fine, such as rollback, check in changes and keep checked out, and search.)
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Windows service setup projects - Unable to build custom action error
I ran into another under-documented snag upgrading my solution to Visual Studio 2005. It has a Windows service used for behind-the-scenes maintenance sorts of tasks that run on a regular basis, and a corresponding setup project. Now, it's also got setup projects for command-line apps and web apps, and all of those upgraded fairly well--it got confused on the output, so I had to delete and re-add the appropriate Primary Output to each project, but after that, all the setup projects built fine, except the Windows service one.
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Ambiguous match found
Looks like I've been away a few months. Sorry 'bout that. I've had stuff to write about but not enough time to set aside to do so, which is a little ironic; one of the main reasons I created this blog was so I could take 5 minutes and jot down stuff I find out while developing, largely in case it helps others, not so I could write my usual verbose 5000 word essays (which is what my AspAlliance site is for!).