Tools for Developers
Great tools available for free that are essential to every serious .NET developer.
A nasty one, you will probably realize in front of customers.
The workaround can be found on the Windows SDK blog.
Enjoy!
Microsoft released a hotfix [1] for Visual Studio 2008 (also targeting Visual Web Developer Express) that corrects several issues with the web development features.
At this time the hotfix is only available for the English and Japanese versions.
List of things that were corrected according to this post [2] by Vinaya Reddy:
HTML Source view performance
- Source editor freezes for a few seconds when typing in a page with a custom control that has more than two levels of sub-properties.
- “View Code” right-click context menu command takes a long time to appear with web application projects.
- Visual Studio has very slow behavior when opening large HTML documents.
- Visual Studio has responsiveness issues when working with big HTML files with certain markup.
- The Tab/Shift-Tab (Indent/Un-indent) operation is slow with large HTML selections.
Design view performance
- Slow typing in design view with certain page markup configurations.
HTML editing
- Quotes are not inserted after Class or CssClass attribute even when the option is enabled.
- Visual Studio crashes when ServiceReference element points back to the current web page.
JavaScript editing
- When opening a JavaScript file, colorization of the client script is sometimes delayed several seconds.
- JavaScript Intellisense does not work if an empty string property is encountered before the current line of editing.
Web Site build performance
- Build is very slow when Bin folder contains large number of assemblies and .refresh files with web-site projects.
Make sure to read the installation instructions at [2].
Enjoy!
[1] https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/Downloads/DownloadDetails.aspx?DownloadID=10826
[2] http://blogs.msdn.com/webdevtools/archive/2008/02/09/downloadable-hotfix-performance-and-editor-fixes-for-microsoft-visual-studio-2008-and-visual-web-developer-express-2008.aspx
Dominick [1] pointed me a great tip today how to turn of the hosting process (vshost.exe) [2]. This might be interesting for those of you who are debugging applications on Windows Vista with UAC manifests, which sometimes has strange side effects.
[1] http://www.leastprivilege.com/
[2] http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms185330(VS.80).aspx
Included in this release:
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DSL Tools V1 RTM
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IronPython web site and web project samples
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Updated contents and samples for TFS extensibility and Team Test extensibility
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Managed parser & lexer generator tools
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Many more IDE integration samples
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5 new cool PowerToys, including Source Outliner
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Much more!
Team System-specific content in bold.
[Download]
Team Foundation Power Toys is a collection of productivity tools for Team Foundation Server. Borne from practical experience using Team Foundation Server, they are a mix of command-line and Visual Studio integrated tools for users of version control and work item tracking.
[Download here]
Recommended Reading:
After years of waiting we finally have our own developer font - specially designed for the needs for developers.
The installation package automatically configures it as default font for Visual Studio 2005:
"Consolas is a monospaced font (like an old typewriter) and good for programmers setting code (its core purpose). "
via Damir's Blog
Addendum: Using Consolas as the Windows Console Font
[Download]
WSCF offers a simple yet powerful WSDL Wizard that abstracts away all the nitty-gritty details of WSDL and therefore does not give room for making errors and wrong assumptions just by trying to use and applying everything that can be done stated by the original WSDL specification.
- Full support for Visual Studio 2005 and .NET Framework 2.0
- Generation of partial classes
- Support for Nullable types
- Support for SOAP 1.2 binding
- Pascal case conversion is now optional
- Improved support for generating code from SSL-hosted WSDLs
- The parameter ?wsdl can be configured to return the modeled WSDL
- Option for generating different styles of async calling code
- Option for generating improved data binding code available
- Option for generating List types instead of Collections
- As always - it's free!
Link
Another interesting Power Toys from the the Developer Solutions Team at Microsoft:
Managed Stack Explorer (MSE) is a lightweight tool that provides a quick and easy way to monitor .NET 2.0 managed processes and their stacks. The ability to view a program’s stack and how it changes over time is an important method in determining reasons for possible errors. MSE provides a simple interface to allow you to monitor multiple processes at once and build periodic stack log files. MSE works by quickly attaching to a process when a stack trace is requested, then detaching the moment the stack trace has been retrieved.
Link (gotdotnet)
Unit Testing with Visual Studio 2005
Strengthening Visual Studio Unit Tests, MSDN Magazine, March 2006
Write Unit Tests With VSTS, Visual Studio Magazine, January 2006
Unit Testing and Generating Source Code for Unit Test Frameworks, September 2005
Unit Testing in General
Presentation: Net Objectives The Case For Unit Testing Streamzine
You found another good source of information on Unit Testing in VS 2005? Post it as comment!
[Excerpt from my more complete list on www.dotnet-online.com/teamsystem/]
Brief Description
ILMerge is a utility for merging multiple .NET assemblies into a single .NET assembly. It works on executables and DLLs alike and comes with several options for controlling the processing and format of the output. See the accompanying documentation for details.
Download
The Microsoft Build Engine (MSBuild) is the new build platform for Microsoft and Visual Studio and included in the .NET Framework 2.0.
Additionally to the built-in tasks I found the following:
- MSBee: Compile assemblies targeting .NET Fx 1.1 (MSBuild extension)
MSBuild Extras – Toolkit for .NET 1.1 “MSBee” is an addition to MSBuild that allows developers to build managed applications in Visual Studio 2005 that target .NET 1.1.
- Update Assembly Version Numbers (Task)
The AssemblyInfo task provides a way to manipulate the content of AssemblyInfo files at build time. It works with C#, VB, and J# AssemblyInfo files. The primary use of the AssemblyInfo task is to set assembly version numbers at build time.
This post will be constantly updated as new extensions are available.
Your Feedback requested!
Do you know more exciting MSBuild tasks and tips? Drop me a comment!
Robocopy is a 32-bit command-line tool used for file replication. This tool helps maintain identical copies of a directory structure on a single computer or in separate network locations. Robocopy is included in the Microsoft® Windows® Resource Kit.
XmlSerializerPreCompiler (by Chris Sells)
Tired of the XmlSerializer's generic "File or assembly name ctewkx4b.dll, or one of its dependencies, was not found" exception? The XmlSerializerPreCompiler tools checks to see if a type can be serialized by the XmlSerializer class and if it can't, shows the compiler errors happening behind the scenes so that the type can be modified. Enjoy. This just in: Mathew Nolton has posted a GUI front-end to my XmlSerializerPreCompiler that you might find useful. Thanks, Matt!
[Visit Website] [Download now]
.NET FormatDesigner (by Chris Sells)
FormatDesigner is an application to experiment with the format strings used to format data in String.Format and various type's ToString functions.
[Visit Website] [Download now]
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PINVOKE.NET Add-In for Visual Studio (by Adam Nathan)
This add-in for Visual Studio (7.0 or later) gives you two new options when right-clicking in source code: "Insert PInvoke Signatures..." and "Contribute PInvoke Signatures and Types..." It does this by communicating with www.pinvoke.net, the Interop wiki!
[Visit Website] [Download now] |
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Snippet Compiler (by Jeff Key)
NDoc generates class library documentation from .NET assemblies and the XML documentation files generated by the C# compiler (or with an add-on tool for VB.NET).
[Visit Website] [Download now] |
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NDoc Code Documentation Generator for .NET
NDoc generates class library documentation from .NET assemblies and the XML documentation files generated by the C# compiler (or with an add-on tool for VB.NET).
[Visit Website] [Download now] |
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.NET Reflector (by Lutz Roeder)
Reflector is a class browser for .NET components. It supports assembly and namespace views, type and member search, C# XML documentation viewer, call and callee graphs, IL, VB and C# disassembler, dependency trees, base type and derived type hierarchies and resource viewers. C#, Visual Basic and Delphi language syntax is supported.
[Visit Website] [Download now] |