I've been meaning to post something about two awesome and competing toolsets that recently have some news to report.  First, my friends at DevExpress won both the Attendee's Pick : Overall Winner and Breakthrough Product awards at Tech:Ed Developers a couple of weeks ago.  DXperience won the Attendee's Pick.  CodeRush, their ...

Earlier today, as I was working with the Protégé I've been referring to previously, we were debugging some code, and we ran into a little bug. Our tests results would not execute. We tried restarting Visual Studio and a lot of other stuff and it didn't fix it. We eventually just restarted the machine, and that fixed the problem. We figured that ...

Since Visual Studio 2008 came out I've been extremely impressed with the software. One shortcut which I believe probably exists in CodeRush and Resharper is the ability to find the using directive needed at any given time. in VS2008 you can press ctrl + . and a little menu will appear which will add using directives for you. This makes writing ...

As I've said previously, I am working with developers who are just beginning to learn the tools of the trade. They have a long way to go working with plenty of applications. All people always have more they can learn, so I'll pass along a useful reference here. I found this great reference sheet from Microsoft that has a bunch of key-bindings for ...

Microsoft has published a set of white papers which provide a good technical overview of the features available in Visual Studio Team System 2008.  They're available individually for download: Visual Studio Team System 2008 Capabilities White Papers. The papers cover the following subjects, corresponding to features sets and design goals of ...

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 ...