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• VS 2003 Tip #16: Free debuggers

  Life at MS got busy all of a sudden so as a result I blogged less this week. To continue on my last post, the free debuggers we provide are Dbgclr and the command line cordbg. Windbg with sos.dll is a great third one too. The advantages of these debuggers Read More... Posted Thursday, April 29, 2004 4:08 PM by shaykatc | 1 Comments Filed under: Visual Studio 2003 Tips

• VS 2003 Tip #16: Part I - Free debuggers

  Quick - what are the two free managed debuggers that you can get in Everett (not counting VS 2003)? And if you do know the answer (which I'm fairly certain most do) why do you use them over VS 2003? Let me know what scenarios or why! Read More... Posted Wednesday, April 21, 2004 4:46 PM by shaykatc | 9 Comments Filed under: Visual Studio 2003 Tips

• VS 2003 Tip #15: Attaching devenv to a process from the command line.

  Ziv posted: “I've often wondered how to do the equivalent of "windbg -pn ProcessName" in VS.NET. Is it possible?” I dont know of a way to attach a devenv via a command line to a process by name, but I do know how to do it by Process ID (PID). Read More... Posted Monday, April 19, 2004 1:59 PM by shaykatc | 10 Comments Filed under: Visual Studio 2003 Tips

• VS 2003 Tip #14: Impress your friends with these two arcane tips :-)

  Todays tips are more on the arcane side, but when used effectively at a demo, will elevate you to a semi-godlike status in they eyes of the audience:-) The first deals with attaching to an application to debug it. Sometimes you need to attach to an app Read More... Posted Friday, April 16, 2004 9:54 AM by shaykatc | 4 Comments Filed under: Visual Studio 2003 Tips

• VS 2003 Tip #14: What are the requirements to debug a managed application?

  Every now and then we get a question about debugging managed code with Visual Studio. It is a little confusing so I thought I'd shed some light on it in this post. A canonical example to use here is where you have a web server on some remote machine running Read More... Posted Wednesday, April 14, 2004 3:55 PM by shaykatc | 4 Comments Filed under: Visual Studio 2003 Tips

• VS 2003 Tip #13: Getting a connection string quickly

  Often I will be writing some quick code to access a database, and I'll need to add a connection string to get this. Heres a quick way to get the connection string using VS: Open Server Explorer. Right click on Data connections and select “Add new Read More... Posted Tuesday, April 13, 2004 2:47 PM by shaykatc | 5 Comments Filed under: Visual Studio 2003 Tips

• VS 2003 Tip #12: Better view of data in the debugger windows

  In VS 2003 we did some things in C# to make viewing of data in the debugger easier. The first problem we had was that if you expanded a type, in the watch window, you would get an unsorted list of members. This was a pain if you were searching for a particular Read More... Posted Monday, April 12, 2004 2:15 PM by shaykatc | 11 Comments Filed under: Visual Studio 2003 Tips

• VS 2003 Tip #11: Autocomplete on new class creation

  In Everett we made a small change to Intellisense to lessen the code you had to type. Often you will new up a class and write something like: Foo x = new Foo(); In VS7 you had to type out the whole thing. In Everett we had Intellisense pop up after the Read More... Posted Monday, March 29, 2004 4:43 PM by shaykatc | 7 Comments Filed under: Visual Studio 2003 Tips

• VS 2003 Tip #10: Run pre and post build commands from the C# projects

  Vs7 customers complained to us that they wanted pre and post build commands that could be run from the project system. Its pretty reasonable to want to automate some tasks that you would do before or after builds, so in Everett we added this in. To get Read More... Posted Friday, March 26, 2004 11:44 AM by shaykatc | 3 Comments Filed under: Visual Studio 2003 Tips

• Vs 2003 Tip#9: Turning off Dynamic Help

  Joen blogs about this here Read More... Posted Thursday, March 18, 2004 1:00 PM by shaykatc | 0 Comments Filed under: Visual Studio 2003 Tips

• VS 2003 Tip #8: Exception information in the Object browser

  One of the complaints we received from VS7 was that you couldnt tell the exceptions that a particular method could throw. We scratched our heads thinking of ways to do this, as the xml docs did contain this informattion about the class libraries. Ideally Read More... Posted Tuesday, March 16, 2004 2:17 PM by shaykatc | 7 Comments Filed under: Visual Studio 2003 Tips

• VS 2003 Tip #7: Implementing interface stubs automatically

  In Everett, we added a feature to add interface stubs to your code automatically, when you wanted to derive from an interface. To do this simply type out “:” after your class name, type your interface to derive from and you should see a little Read More... Posted Wednesday, March 10, 2004 3:06 PM by shaykatc | 16 Comments Filed under: Visual Studio 2003 Tips

• VS 2003 Tip #6: Keyboard shortcuts

  I'm a keyboard shortcut junkie. I love keyboard shortcuts for tasks. I've been known when speaking to devs to say stuff like “Ctrl+alt+l, Select foo.cpp, Ctrl+alt_w+1...no, hit Ctrl+alt...” instead of “ Open the solution explorer, select Read More... Posted Thursday, March 04, 2004 11:47 AM by shaykatc | 28 Comments Filed under: Visual Studio 2003 Tips

• VS 2003 Tip #5: Intellisense in the immediate window

  Ok, one other new feature we added was to add intellisense to the immediate window. The immediate window is a window used to evaluate expressions, much like the VB6 one. When debugging and in break mode, you can open it up from Debug->Windows->Immediate. Read More... Posted Monday, March 01, 2004 10:55 PM by shaykatc | 27 Comments Filed under: Visual Studio 2003 Tips

• VS 2003 Tip #4: Demo better with the toolbox and task list

  Two quick simple techniques for people who need to demo code (as I wait for the traffic in front of my house to recede before getting to work). Oftentimes, you want to demo some code quickly to people and don't want to type it all in. The Toolbox window Read More... Posted Friday, February 27, 2004 9:19 AM by shaykatc | 6 Comments Filed under: Visual Studio 2003 Tips