Habib Heydarian's Blog @ Microsoft

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...

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...

As early as Visual Studio 2002, Visual Studio has supported the ability to see the dependencies between projects in a solution. However, the experience is somewhat clunky in that you can only see the dependencies one project at a time. In the example...

Software quality is a subject that is near and dear to my heart. At PDC 2009 this year, there is full day workshop on how to use Visual Studio Team System 2010 to develop high quality software . I'm really excited about this workshop since it covers a...

In a previous blog , I covered how to debug a LINQ to SQL query using the Historical Debugger. In this blog, I'll discuss using the Historical Debugger to debug an exception. The are a couple of reasons why the Historical Debugger is so useful when it...

Formatting strings is a very common task in .NET development. Examples include formatting dates and currencies, composing a HTML response, creating error messages, etc. One of the downsides of string formatting is that if done incorrectly, you can end...

Last weekend, I spent a good 30 minutes trying to figure out why I wasn't hitting a breakpoint in a method. Admittedly, I wasn't very familiar with the code since I hadn't written it. It turned out that the method wasn't being called from anywhere, so...

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...

One of the new features that we have added in Visual Studio Team System 2010 is the ability to create a new UML Sequence Diagram as well as generate one from existing code. I'm not going to go into too much detail on what a UML sequence diagram is since...

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...

Like any software product, with every new release of Visual Studio, we add numerous new features to support additional scenarios, improve existing features based on customer feedback and occasionally, we remove some features based on a number of factors...

In Visual Studio Team System 2010, one of the new features that we have added to the Profiler is the ability to measure the performance of JScript code that runs in the browser. This means that if you have a web application that contains ASP.NET AJAX...

In a recent Channel 9 10-4 video, Brian Keller introduced the Historical Debugger in Visual Studio Team System 2010. One of the features that he described in his video was the Historical Debugger Navigation Bar (Navbar) which he used to step back in the...

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,...

Sample code is great because it allows you to quickly get up to speed with a new technology or learn how an API works and sometimes, you might even use some of the code in your own application. The major downside of reusing sample code is that most often...

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...

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...

Code Analysis in Visual Studio Team System can be extremely helpful when it comes to pointing out subtle bugs that are hard to detect even via code inspection. One example is dealing with NaN. NaN which stands for Not a Number , represents a constant...

In Visual Studio 2008 and earlier releases, one of the key complaints is that the debugger doesn't allow you to debug 64-bit mixed mode (managed and native) applications. In fact, if you try to debug a 64-bit mixed mode application, you will see an error...

I've covered the Visual Studio 2010 Historical Debugger extensively in a few of the previous posts. In this post, I'll cover how the Historical Debugger makes debugging LINQ to SQL queries a lot more convenient. If you are trying to debug a LINQ to SQL...

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...

One of the new features that we've added to the Visual Studio 2010 debugger is the ability to manage breakpoints more effectively. You might say that the existing Breakpoints window is a fine tool for being able to manage your breakpoints. After all,...

In an earlier blog , I described how to use the new WPF Visualizer to debug WPF applications in Visual Studio 2010. We've added another feature that further improves the debugging experience for WPF applications. The Visual Studio 2010 debugger can now...

Prior to Team System 2010, if you try to profile an application on a virtual machine (e.g. Virtual PC, Hyper-V, VMWare) using sampling mode, this is the error that you will see: Unfortunately, if you want to use sampling mode, you're pretty much stuck...

This should make many C/C++ developers happy when Visual Studio 2010 becomes available (you can download Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 right now). In previous versions of Visual Studio, one of the complains that we've received is that developers want to use...