Category: Software Development Tips & Tricks
Scoping Selectors in CSS and jQuery: Working Small to Big
SS and jQuery selectors can be very powerful, but with great power comes great chances to mess things up (yes, you can quote that). One such problem I’ve seen is applying these selectors at a much higher level than is needed. This may work for some cases, but will probably end up causing headaches and…
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Upgrading Projects to SQL 2012: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
Experience is always a great teacher. And if I can learn something through experience I like to share it, especially if I can save others any amount of hassle. Case in point: our recent experience with upgrading to Microsoft SQL 2012 and how it affected our projects and nightly builds. Install This process is pretty…
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Exclude Those Unit Tests!
Do you have a unit test that you don’t want to run in the nightly build? No problem. Just add the TestCategory attribute to your test and give it a “DontRunWithBuild” name or something else memorable. In Visual Studio, go to the Team Explorer, right-click on the build you want to exclude and click Edit…
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Deploying Console Apps via MSBuild
VS2010 and MSBuild don’t provide a good way to deploy windows apps using continuous integration (especially to different environments). Over the past couple days I’ve wasted a lot of time manually deploying my apps to test them on dev. Brian Gansemer has talked about creating hooks for deploying ClickOnce apps as part of the build…
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Our Favorite Visual Studio 2010 Shortcuts/Customizations
Our first group blog post! Here are some of the DPL team’s favorite shortcuts for saving time in Visual Studio 2010. Hopefully you’ll find these as useful as we do. Note that these work when you’re using the standard C#.NET keyboard layout, which is the same as “DEFAULT” in the Keyboard options. Andy Unterseher –…
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Load Testing in Visual Studio 2010
Have you ever wondered if your custom data access code is any more efficient than simply loading a DataTable? Not that I’d recommend using DataTables except for certain situations, but Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate makes it easy to load test your data access classes to determine performance. In order to test this out I created…
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Manually Setting Up Associations in POCO
When manually writing Plain Old CLR Objects (POCOs) (that is, not using the T4 template mechanism), you’ll be left with not only replicating the structure of the table itself in the object layout, but also any objects associated with said structure (foreign keys). As an example, note the following association: The SalesTerritory object, even though…
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Isolating 32-bit COM Components on 64-bit Build Servers
A few weeks back while getting Mako XRM ready for launch, I was working through an issue involving ClickOnce build and deployment. I was attempting to isolate a 32-bit COM component so it would not need to be registered on every end-user’s computer upon ClickOnce install. MSDN has a decent article describing the process (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms165432(v=vs.80).aspx)…
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ASP.Net Page Properties
Below is an example of how I like to use properties to access HTML items from code-behind. It allows you to have strongly-typed objects and a single point of access to HTML items.
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Feature Builder Power Tool – Introduction
This post introduces Microsoft’s Feature Builder Power Tool (Feature Builder) and describes its major components. Feature Builder is a Visual Studio Extension that allows a developer to quickly create a feature extension for Visual Studio 2010 (VS). By introducing a new framework, developers are now able to easily integrate templates, add-ins and documentation in a…
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