Welcome to MSDN Blogs Sign in | Join | Help

June 2009 - Posts

Tuesday, June 30, 2009 7:24 PM

Walkthrough: Using the Tier Interaction Profiler in Visual Studio Team System 2010

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
Posted by habibh | 0 Comments
Monday, June 29, 2009 9:01 PM

Sticky DataTips: A new way to view variables in the Visual Studio 2010 debugger

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
Posted by habibh | 0 Comments
Friday, June 26, 2009 6:45 AM

NetCFSvcUtil.exe and Windows 7

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
Posted by habibh | 0 Comments
Filed under:
Thursday, June 25, 2009 12:01 PM

Moving code around in Visual Studio super fast [Video]

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,
Posted by habibh | 0 Comments
Filed under:
Wednesday, June 24, 2009 11:09 PM

Walkthrough: Adding an existing Visual Studio solution to another solution

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
Posted by habibh | 1 Comments
Filed under:
Tuesday, June 23, 2009 11:29 AM

Debug this! How a change in the cloud broke my application

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
Posted by habibh | 0 Comments
Filed under:
Monday, June 22, 2009 10:55 PM

Troubleshooting the dreaded "Unable to start program '%CSIDL_PROGRAM_FILES%\..." problem

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
Posted by habibh | 0 Comments
Filed under:
Friday, June 19, 2009 7:55 PM

Web Application Projects: No Help for you!

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
Posted by habibh | 0 Comments
Filed under:
Thursday, June 18, 2009 5:01 PM

An in depth look at the Historical Debugger in Visual Studio 2010 (Part V)

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
Posted by habibh | 1 Comments
Filed under:
Wednesday, June 17, 2009 6:54 AM

How to avoid stepping into C++ class and function templates in the Visual Studio debugger

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,
Posted by habibh | 1 Comments
Filed under:
Tuesday, June 16, 2009 12:31 PM

How to select and edit multiple columns in Visual Studio 2008 [Video]

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.
Posted by habibh | 1 Comments
Filed under:
Monday, June 15, 2009 5:29 AM

Importing and exporting breakpoints in Visual Studio 2010

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.
Posted by habibh | 2 Comments
Filed under:
Friday, June 12, 2009 11:50 PM

Visual Studio Debugger: Break When Expression has Changed

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.
Posted by habibh | 1 Comments
Filed under:
Thursday, June 11, 2009 2:46 PM

An in depth look at the Historical Debugger in Visual Studio 2010 (Part IV)

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
Posted by habibh | 1 Comments
Filed under:
Wednesday, June 10, 2009 11:40 PM

How to view the return value of a C# or VB method in the VS Debugger

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 4: public double
Posted by habibh | 1 Comments
Filed under:
Tuesday, June 09, 2009 12:18 PM

An in depth look at the Historical Debugger in Visual Studio 2010 (Part III)

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
Posted by habibh | 2 Comments
Filed under:
Monday, June 08, 2009 10:52 AM

How to display the environment variables for a process in the Visual Studio debugger

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()
Posted by habibh | 1 Comments
Filed under:
Friday, June 05, 2009 5:05 PM

Size Specifier: How to display a C/C++ pointer as an array in the Visual Studio debugger

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[])
Posted by habibh | 0 Comments
Filed under:
Thursday, June 04, 2009 10:12 PM

The Charles Babbage Difference Engine

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
Posted by habibh | 0 Comments
Filed under:
Wednesday, June 03, 2009 8:45 PM

An in depth look at the Historical Debugger in Visual Studio 2010 (Part II)

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
Posted by habibh | 1 Comments
Filed under:
Tuesday, June 02, 2009 10:21 PM

An in depth look at the Historical Debugger in Visual Studio 2010 (Part I)

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
Posted by habibh | 2 Comments
Filed under:
Monday, June 01, 2009 10:42 PM

Using the WPF Visualizer to debug applications in Visual Studio 2010

WPF applications make writing rich client applications much easier but the main drawback is that debugging XAML is difficult. The Visual Studio debugger is very good at debugging imperative languages but when it comes to debugging declarative technologies
Posted by habibh | 3 Comments
Filed under:
 
Page view tracker