Skinner's Blog

Wanted to make you folks aware of a few new videos that have been recently made showing the latest capabilities in the recently released beta for Visual Studio. I just recently recorded a ~30 minute piece on the Visual Studio Toolbox site . Consider this...

Since the initial release of the Debugger Canvas last summer, the team has been busy taking all the great feedback from you, acting on it, and preparing a new release. That release, Debugger Canvas 1.1, has just been released on DevLabs! The teams has...

The folks behind the Debugger Canvas project ( a few from my team, a few from MSR ) are very interested in picking your brain on what you like about it and what you don’t like about it. To that end, they are looking to get a one hour conference call together...

We just finished announcing all the great new stuff that will be coming in the next version of Visual Studio, specifically talking about the Application Lifecycle Management features that you can expect in that release. Please check out Jason Zander’s...

Wanted to point out a great new feature that the MSDN team has just made available when searching in the MSDN library. The feature is dubbed “Instant Answers”. Try this out. Go to msdn.microsoft.com, then click the library tab ( or go directly there by...

I’m a bit tardy in passing this information along, but the Rangers have recently ( April 18th ) released a new version of the Architecture Guidance . Check out Willy’s post for more details, or go and download it directly here . A bunch of great prescriptive...

Registration for this year’s Tech Ed North America is open. The convention is happening May 16-19 in Atlanta, GA this year. This is going to be another great convention, with tons of new content, learnings, and simple collaboration guaranteed. One of...

Last post , I gave you a simple introduction to Symbol Servers. I showed you how you can use the options in Visual Studio to quickly get access to Microsoft public symbols and how that could give you more information for your debugging sessions. However...

Whether you are doing pre or post mortem debugging, whether you are using Visual Studio or WinDBG, one of the most important things you can do ( short of not writing the bug in the first place! ) to ready yourself for a productive debugging session is...

The Developer Guidance team has just released Building a Windows Phone 7 Application from Start to Finish in the MSDN Library.  This content is intended to help developers with common challenges by putting the features together in a complete application...

The Visual Studio Debugger has long been regarded to be one of the industries best debugger. The VS debugger’s ability to give developer’s insight into the running behavior and state of their .NET and native applications has been the foundation of what...

Quite a few folks have been playing with the Windows Phone 7 platform, creating all kinds of crazy games, utilities, etc. for this new platform. I am no different. I simply couldn’t help myself, so once I had my new Samsung Focus in hand ( November of...

Wanted to directly call out a number of positions that are currently open on my team. To refresh everyone’s memory, my team, internally called “Visual Studio Ultimate”, is responsible for features ranging from the Visual Studio debugger to the Visualization...

Our UE ( User Education ) team is constantly updating our documentation on MSDN. This last month is no exception. Be sure to check out the details here on Patrick’s blog about the latest updates. Lot’s of about T4 templates and extending our UML Models...

Lots of news today, as we have release the first service pack to Visual Studio 2010. At the same time, the teams are making available a new Feature Pack the enables a much tighter integration between Team Foundation Server and Project Server. Please see...

Grant Holliday has recently published a blog post that goes into more of the details around using IntelliTrace with your Azure projects. He does a great job in going through some of the lower level details of how to best use IntelliTrace in the Azure...

In my last post , I announced a new power tool that allows you to analyze your managed assemblies to determine various complexity metrics. The output of the power tool is a fairly simple XML file, so in this post, I wanted to show you how simple it is...

Yesterday, we made available a power tool that allows you to analyze assemblies in order to understand the complexity metrics associated with those assemblies. I’m going to describe how to use that power tool and the results it generates. If you are not...

Here’s another little gem I’ve got for you. As you probably know, Visual Studio is a big product, with contributions coming from many many different teams, and languages. A big part of Visual Studio is written in managed languages these days, and there...

On November 16-18 here on campus, Microsoft sponsored an event called the “ALM Summit”. The event turned out to be a great success, with three days chalk full of useful presentations / information. You can now see all the presentations, as they were recorded...

Steve Cook , a long time architect on my team, has made available a sample that shows how to access the UML meta data in Visual Studio’s  new UML project system and export that data into the OMG’s XMI data format. XMI is the OMG standard used to...

I just tripped into this little gem and just couldn’t let this go without telling somebody, ‘cause I could have used this little feature 15 years ago! Ever had to find a file on your machine with the only purpose to determine the absolute location to...

Do you use Visual Studio 2010 everyday? If so, I’d really appreciate it if you could take 5-10 minutes and fill out the following questions found in this survey: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=203459 We’re really trying to get as much feedback...

Brian Harry just blogged about a conference we’ll be hosting on the Redmond Microsoft campus this November 16-18th. If you do get a chance, drop by. I’ll be giving a talk about lessons learned and challenges overcome while I led a few product team transformations...

In my last post , I discussed the benefits of the Tier Interaction Profiler found in Visual Studio 2010 Premium. If you are accessing a database via ADO.NET APIs ( which includes the new Entity Framework 4.0 features ), you can get the same benefits from...