Telerik blogs
  • Desktop WPF

    WPF: Debugging Expression Blend Exceptions with Visual Studio

     Although Expression Blend and Visual Studio can work on the same solution / project files, they remain two separate IDEs and it is not uncommon for certain functionality to work correctly in the Visual Studio design-time environment and throw an error in the Expression Blend one. The Blend error output does not always help much with identifying the reason for the erroneous behavior:    This clearly does not give us enough information to track the problem down. Fortunately there is an easier way to detect the problem instead of wandering around the code in a manual “debugging” session – the Visual Studio...
    October 16, 2008 1 min read
  • Productivity

    Visual Studio Tip: Spice Up the IDE

    Developing .NET applications is fun stuff. However, if you're like me sometimes using the same tools every day can get a little boring. That's why I often like to spice things up by changing the look of my IDE. Lucky for us, Visual Studio makes it easy to change the look of your development environment in just a few clicks. By heading to Tools | Import and Export Settings... you can export and save a backup of your current settings (a recommended practice before trying out any new settings) or import new settings from a file. These settings are saved in...
    October 06, 2008 2 min read
  • Productivity

    Visual Studio Tip: Creating Your Own Code Snippets

    I recently blogged about using code snippets as a shortcut to writing more code in less time. In this post, I'm going to walk you through the steps to create custom snippets that you can install into Visual Studio for use in your own projects To get started, let's take a look at the anatomy of a snippet. A snippet is nothing more than an XML file, with a .snippet extension, containing configuration settings. If you open up the file foreach.snippet (located in "<Visual Studio installation directory>\VC#\Snippets\1033\Visual C#") you'll find the following XML, which defines the foreach snippet: As you can see, the XML used to...
    September 12, 2008 8 min read
  • Productivity

    Visual Studio Tip: Using Code Snippets

    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...
    September 05, 2008 3 min read
  • Productivity

    Visual Studio 2008 Intellisense and Telerik.Charting

    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...
    August 29, 2008 2 min read