Productivity

A few weeks ago I blogged about creating your own reusable templates for Visual Studio. One of my favorite things about Visual Studio is that it offers a lot of great ways for developers to improve the development experience (and productivity) by adding many extensibility points in the IDE. Now developers have the option of adding on to existing features of Visual Studio with templates and macros, or integrating completely unique features directly into the IDE with add-ins. One of these extensibility features, snippets, adds a ton of value to developer productivity and is incredibly easy to use. Snippets are small, parameterized...

I was innocently writing a piece of code today and the need arose to check if an input type is a number. Naturally I started looking for such a method inside the .NET classes. After all for a framework which has more than 380,000 methods it will only be logical to have at least one which will do something as basic as this. Guess what? .NET does not ship with such a public method. Whaaaa? But do stay with me, please! It gets better. Armed with Reflector I decided that even if there is no such public method there must be a private one at...

By default the RadControls installer adds the Telerik.Charting assembly to the GAC on the machine where the package is installed, as the Telerik.Charting assembly is used by more than one package - RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX and RadControls for Winforms. So, let's consider an example -- create a new web site and use at least one control from the suite. When you drag a control from the toolbox Visual Studio will automatically copy Telerik.Web.UI.dll to site's Bin folder. Telerik.Web.UI assembly refers to Telerik.Charting assembly. But as long as Telerik.Charting is in the GAC it will not be copied to the...

If you are doing serious software development you probably have automated builds (via TeamBuild or some other tool) which build all the build configurations you have, run all your unit tests, run code analysis rules, run source analysis rules and more. While writing code you probably want to have all those extra tools and checks turned off because they will drag your productivity down. When you are about to check-in, however, you will need to make sure your solution builds without errors in different build configurations as well as run all tests to make sure you are not about to...

That's right, SP1 for Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 went live today. You can read about the highlights here, or just go download the service pack and check it out for yourself. WPF designer support in the IDE and WPF performance increases in the framework were big items delivered in this service pack. Also included is the ADO.NET Entity Framework, ADO.NET Data Services, and support for SQL Server 2008. This release comes on the heels of the release of SQL Server 2008 just a few days ago....