Habib Heydarian's Blog @ Microsoft

When installing Team Foundation Server 2010 Beta 1, you might run across the following error during the readiness check: Error    [ Reporting ] TF255275: The following Web service for SQL Server Reporting Services could not be accessed...

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...

There are numerous articles on the web that describe the perils of SQL Injection attacks and warn developers about the fact that "All Input is Evil!". If you are interested in reading more about what a SQL Injection attack is, Wikipedia has...

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...

In Visual Studio Team System 2010, we've made a huge number of improvements to the Profiler. In case you didn't know that Visual Studio Team System has a Profiler, see the documentation on MSDN. One of the major improvements that we have made to the Profiler...

There are numerous ways to view variables in the Visual Studio debugger. You can use the Autos window, Locals window, Quick Watch, four different Watch windows, etc. In Visual Studio 2010, we've made it even easier to see the value of variables. Over...

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...

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...

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...

For the first time, I experienced first hand one of the perils of making use of services in the cloud. One of the sample applications that I use here at Microsoft for designing and experimenting with new Visual Studio features is DinnerNow.net. DinnerNow...

If you have used Visual Studio to write Windows Mobile applications, you might have come across the following error message when you press F5 to start the debugger: --------------------------- Microsoft Visual Studio --------------------------- Unable...

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...

In the fifth installment of this series, I’m going to look at how to use the Historical Debugger to diagnose a Unit Test failure. The experience for using the Historical Debugger for debugging Unit Testing is somewhat similar to diagnosing a manual test...

There are a number of C++ libraries that make use of templates. STL, Boost, MFC and ATL are some of the well known libraries that make use of templates. One of the downsides of using these libraries is that they can make debugging tedious. Specifically...

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...

In Visual Studio 2010, we have added the ability to import and export breakpoints. There are several scenarios where being able to import/export breakpoints is useful. For example, you can share breakpoints with other developers in your organization....

One of the lesser known features of the Visual Studio debugger is the ability to break when a variable or range of memory has changed. In a nutshell, the debugger checks the variable or the range of memory as each line or each instruction is executed...

In this segment on the Historical Debugger, I’m going to focus on how the Historical Debugger can help in debugging Build Acceptance Test failures or what is commonly referred to as Build Verification Tests (BVTs). Imagine this scenarios: As part of your...

One of the questions that comes up frequently is how do I view the return value of a VB or C# method in the VS debugger? For example, let’s say that you have the following class: 1: public class Sphere 2: { 3: // Area = 4 * Area of Circle ...

In part III of the coverage of the Historical Debugger, I’m going to look at another scenario of the Historical Debugger which is the ability to record and playback manual test failures. One of the problems areas in software development that really impacts...

Every process in Windows has what’s known as an "environment block" that contains the process' environment variables and their values. Programmatically, you can display the environment variables for a process using the ::GetEnvironmentStrings...

Viewing a C/C++ array in the Visual Studio debugger is easy. You can expand the array in the Watch window (or any other variables window) and see its values. For example, let’s say you have the following C++ code: int _tmain( int argc, _TCHAR* argv[]...

This week, I was in Silicon Valley to talk to a number of ISV customers about what’s coming up in Visual Studio Team System 2010 for C++ developers. I’ve always wanted to go to the Computer History Museum and this time, I had a couple of hours before...

In Part I of this post, I talked about the Application Event Recording capabilities of the Historical Debugger. In this segment, I’m going to look at another capability of the Historical Debugger which is Playback Debugging or what some people refer to...

In one of my earlier blogs, I introduced a new feature in Visual Studio 2010 called the Historical Debugger that truly transforms how you debug applications. In this blog and subsequent blogs, I’m going to cover in depth how and when to use the Historical...