I did a channel 9 interview right before the holidays where I talk about the front end and the IntelliSense architecture in general. I was going to write an intro but I'll be lazy and reuse the one from the interview http://channel9.msdn.com...

I haven't actually written in a long time which its an indication of how busy things have been around here. I put together a presentation about how to handle itermitent test failures earlier this year and I've been meaning to turn it into a document and...

When used correctly code coverage can be a great data point to assess your test quality and test holes. What a lot of people don’t realize though is that code coverage doesn’t actually means good tests or even that all the areas that are covered...

I was working with some pixel values the other day and I had this problem; I’m getting an RGBA value from my object model but it returns it on a string format (ie: 0, 1, 1, .5 ). For this specific task I only cared about the alpha value so I figured...

No matter how much test automation you have nothing will ever substitute the value added by manual testing. I could go on as to why but nothing beats a real story so here's what happened to me a couple of weeks ago: I had just finished implementing...

I ran across this issue while working on the UI for one of our tools and I found a bunch of code samples to solve the issue for regular controls and vague references (but no samples) as to how to work with this on toolstrip controls (in my case I needed...

This is a topic that anyone doing software testing faces every time they are writing new tests. What are the advantages and disadvantages of each? When should I use them? What’s a healthy mix? Let’s start with the basic definition of each of these...

One of the requests we that we often heard from our customers was the ability to disable IntelliSense at will. There are ways of disabling it on previous versions via macros and other tricks (more details about that from this blog post ) but we all agree...

I was working with one of our tools and ran into the following problem. The tool is on the PATH environment variable and we run it from different folders (through the console). On those folders the tool builds an assembly, loads it through reflection...

One of the new features for C++ in Visual Studio 2010 is the auto completion of #include statements. Overall it’s a pretty simple feature and the behavior is exactly the same as regular IntelliSense auto completion. When you invoke it if there’s an exact...

On a previous post dealing with Xml Serialization I mentioned that one of the ways you could achieve this was by customizing the read and write methods. I’m going to bypass the wrapping the code into Read/Write methods and go straight to the code: ...

Found some more “old” stuff while organizing, this is a repost from an entry I wrote for the Visual C++ Team blog ( click here for the original post ) When writing automated testing for specific features in your applications you usually have...

I found this recently while going through my documents, it's something I wrote last November on one of those days where I was just inspired to write and it's definitely something worth sharing. Recently reading an article about Ray Ozzie this...

One of the new features of Visual Studio 10 is the Navigate To feature (previously called Quick Search). I could write a whole article about the discussions around the naming but at least for now we’re sticking to Navigate To (with the disclaimer being...

Something that’s pretty common is to load and export data from applications to settings or data files. I’m going to be concentrating on the scenario in which you have some sort of data structure that you want to save or load the whole contents of the...

Last week I was working on an AddIn and I needed an instance of IServiceProvider. The closest I found was this piece of code: EnvDTE. Project project; IServiceProvider serviceProvider = new ServiceProvider (project.DTE as Microsoft.VisualStudio...

A bit about myself, my name is Raul Perez. I'm currently part of the Visual C++ IDE team and I've been working here for little over a year. I'm originally from Puerto Rico, I lived there for 27 years and yes my native tongue is Spanish. Before working...