Last week I gave three presentations at the DevConnections spring show in Orlando.  I received a lot of great feedback from attendees which I definitely appreciate, especially since I was feeling a little bit bad about having run out of time in my first two talks (and overcompensating a bit on my last one, which ended a few minutes ...

I've been posting about some feature requests for ASP.NET/Visual Studio, so here's one more in that thread. One nice feature of Blend is the ability to select a chunk of XAML and choose to ''Extract User Control''.  The result works very nicely, creating the separate control and inserting the reference to that control into the original XAML ...

While installing SQL Server 2005 recently I ran into some difficulty. I use database projects from Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Database Professionals. I use Visual Studio 2008 with them now, and I recently made a mistake while using one of these projects. When I ran this project my default instance of SQL Server was not listed, so I ...

Not sure if it's already there, but the folks at DevExpress or JetBrains (or Microsoft, but I don't want to wait for another VS) should have a refactoring for CodeRush/Refactor! or Resharper that will convert verbose properties into C# 3.5 short properties, like so: Make this: protected bool isSponsored = false;public bool IsSponsored{ get { ...

Just finished building a couple of ultimate developer rig machines for the office for Brendan and me, and was adding software today.  So I installed Office, Visual Studio 2008, and then SQL Server 2005.  I'd forgotten that installing SQL 2005 client tools seems to require sacrificing a chicken under the right lunar conditions in ...

I was doing a bunch of Silverlight last night on a new machine and once again set up my shortcut to basically arrow left in order to let me type in attributes without taking my fingers off of the keyboard and go hunting for arrow keys.  I described this shortcut (and the reason for it) here, and I have to say it increases my speed in typing ...

I'm working with a client this week to set up Continuous Integration for their development environment.  They're a small shop who are using Visual Studio 2008 Professional, and don't intend to upgrade to Team Suite or Team Edition any time soon.  The build environment would therefore be running CruiseControl.NET, not Team Foundation ...

I have three things that have been on my wish list for ASP.NET and/or Visual Studio that I'm curious to know what others think.  I've mentioned some of these before on my blog or elsewhere - they're not exactly earth shattering and I'm not saying that I want them more than any other feature they might add.  But each one would make my ...

Sadly, Microsoft decided that with the addition of the Title attribute on the @Page directive, it would make sense to include it by default with some text that one would absolutely never want to use as the title, "Untitled Page".  They could have named it "Customer Reporting" or "My Britney Fan Page" and it would ...

A couple of months ago I found a great Extended Strongly Typed Resource Generator that would let me use Resource files in shared libraries (Brendan blogged about it and set it up).  The default resource generator in Visual Studio generates code that is marked with the internal keyword, making it difficult to share the resources between ...