Category: Software Development Tips & Tricks
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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ClickOnce: Revisited
Recently we’ve received a couple comments on my blog post ClickOnce Publish and Deploy from Team Foundation Server 2010 so I thought we should do a follow-up post to share what we’ve learned. One of our readers, Anye, was having some trouble getting the build to copy the published ClickOnce application over into the ClickOnce…
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Remote Shelving/Unshelving Changes in Team Foundation Server
Let’s talk shelving. Not the kind you try to build in your garage that never fits together, and not a bunch of milk cartons stacked on each other. I’m talking about source control shelvesets. Think of them as a snapshot of your local workspace at a given time. We use them a lot in many…
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Single-Stepping Through MS Code
Microsoft allows you to single-step through the framework code via Visual Studio 2008/10. To enable this under 2010 is trivial. Do the following: Within Visual Studio, open Tools > Options…. The following window displays. Browse to Debugging – Symbols. Make sure the Microsoft Symbol Servers checkbox is checked, and indicate a place on your drive…
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ClickOnce Publish and Deploy from Team Foundation Server 2010
Overview ClickOnce technology is a very powerful way to distribute your applications to end users. It is especially nice for easily distributing updates to your application. Even if you don’t plan to distribute your application using ClickOnce technology, it is still a great tool for deploying daily updates for QA during development. However, publishing and…
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Enforcing Architecture Rules with Visual Studio
Visual Studio Modeling Projects allow you to quickly generate useful documentation for your design: class diagrams, sequence diagrams, dependency diagrams. All are very nice to look at and useful for getting to know the system. An additional, somewhat hidden feature of Modeling Projects is the ability to enforce architecture rules. In this post I’ll go…
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“Transforming” App.Config Files in a TFS Build
Do you develop using your production or staging SQL server? If so, please don’t. If not, great! How do you keep track of which Web.Config is pushed to your server? VS2010 has an improved Web Deploy process that allows you to use config transforms to adjust your Web.Config files based on the build configuration. Scott…
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