Category: Software Development Tips & Tricks
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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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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