I was talking to someone the other day and he asked me whether Visual Studio has a tool to count the lines of code in an application. It occurred to me that others might be interested in the answer so I decided to blog about it. There is a tool called Code Metrics in Visual Studio 2008 and 2010 that...

One of the most popular features in the Visual Studio debugger is the ability to edit code during a debug session and have the changes apply without having to stop the debugger, recompile the application and then run the application to verify the changes. This feature is affectionately known as "Edit...

When debugging an application, there are times when you want the debugger to stop whenever any of the functions in a particular class are called. An example of this may be when you are trying to find out which object is calling your class. Of course, you could manually set a breakpoint on every function...

On the Visual Studio debugger team, one of the areas where we regularly receive feedback is when breakpoints don't work. Furthermore, some of the error messages that the debugger displays when a breakpoint fails are generic so it might be hard to diagnose why a breakpoint doesn't work correctly (we're...

One of the questions that comes up about debugging dump files is how to debug a dump file that was created from a 64-bit process. The reason why this question comes up is because Visual Studio itself is a 32-bit application and therefore, cannot debug a 64-bit dump file (or process). As a result, the...

Now that the DinnerNow.net 3.1 sample application has been released, I thought I'd share some information about the project to help developers learn more about DinnerNow.net and what they can expect after downloading it. The following table summarizes the artifacts (source code, images, et.c) that make...

DinnerNow.net 3.1 follows in the footsteps of the 3.0 release of DinnerNow.net by adding support for new Microsoft operating systems and platforms. New in DinnerNow 3.1 is support for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. Also, DinnerNow 3.1 adds support for 64-bit operating systems and SQL Server 2008...

As 64-bit machines become mainstream, one of the problems that developers run into is dealing with registry keys and directories. This is because many applications and runtimes are designed to run on both 64-bit and WOW64 . The problem comes about because the same application or runtime is installed...

In an earlier blog post , I mentioned that NetCFSvcUtil.exe (available as part of Power Toys for .NET Compact Framework 3.5) is broken on the following operating systems: Window 7 RTM Windows Server 2008 R2 Windows Vista SP2 Windows Server 2008 SP2 Specifically, when you try to run NetCFSvcUtil.exe on...

If you are a developer and you are planning to write applications for Windows 7, then one of the best places to start is the Windows 7 Training Kit For Developers which was released today. The Window 7 Training Kit has everything you need to get started with programming Windows 7, including sample code...

One of the questions that comes up regularly on newsgroups is "How do I skip over a section of my code in the Visual Studio debugger?" The answer depends on the meaning of the word "skip" but in general, there are three ways that you can skip over a section of code in the debugger...

Setting a breakpoint in the Visual Studio debugger is as simple as placing your cursor on a line of code and pressing F9. However, once you've set the breakpoint, how do you move it to a different location since clicking on the breakpoint will delete it? One workaround is to delete the breakpoint and...

At first glance, the Visual Studio Output window appears to be a boring tool whose only role in life is to display status information. However, look more closely and you will find that it provides several features that can be extremely useful. Below, I’ve listed the most common scenarios where I use...

About two weeks ago, version 3.0 of the DinnerNow.net sample application was released and I covered the release in this blog . Since then, there have been close to 800 downloads of the application. To help people ramp up on DinnerNow, I've created a short video that shows how to install and configure...

Most Windows GUI applications share a common trait. They all have multiple forms and/or dialogs. In the screenshot below, this simple application alone has four WPF windows. If I want to debug the main window, that's easy. I just press F5 and the main window or form starts up. However, if I want to debug...

Once in a while, I come across a feature in the debugger where I ask myself: "I wonder if anyone knows about this feature!" Yesterday, I came across just such a feature: Did you know that the debugger can play a sound when a breakpoint is triggered? Watch this short video and then continue...

It's been a very long time coming but the next version of DinnerNow.net is finally here! In case you haven’t heard of DinnerNow, it is a fictitious marketplace where customers can order food from local restaurants for delivery to their home or office. DinnerNow is designed to demonstrate how you can...

Even though you are not supposed to manually edit a Visual Studio project file, there are times when you really don't have a choice. For example, sometimes upgrading a project from a previous version of Visual Studio fails and the only way to fix the problem is to open the project file in something like...

NetCFSvcUtil.exe is the analogous of Svcutil.exe but for devices. You can use it to generate a WCF client from a WCF service. You can then consume the generated client code in a Windows Mobile application . Unfortunately, the current version of NetCFSvcUtil.exe (3.5.7338.0) that is available from Power...

As a developer, one of the common tasks is move code around. In this video, I'll demonstrate how using the Outlining Expansion feature in Visual Studio makes it a whole lot easier to copy and paste entire methods or classes. The trick is using the CTRL+M, CTRL+M shortcut key to collapse bodies of code...

Often, developers partition their applications into separate Visual Studio solutions in order to make managing the complexity of the overall application easier. Sometimes, the reverse is true. That is, you may want to combine several existing solutions into one master solution. The reason for doing this...

I always find these types of bugs amusing and somewhat ironic. The other day, I was doing some work with Web Application Projects. When I first tried to open the project, Visual Studio 2008 kindly warned me that in order to use IIS with my WAP, I need to run Visual Studio elevated. Wanting to learn more...

When I was at university, my editor of choice was Emacs, primarily because it was very keyboard friendly and I could pretty much do everything with a few key strokes. Once you got used to the modifier keys, editing and navigation in Emacs was effortless. One of my favorite features in Emacs is the ability...