Jelle Druyts has released a neat little tool for Visual Studio that allows to easily design and visualize the configuration for a .Net solution, without messing around with ConfigurationSection and ConfigurationElement source files, which is quite handy when things become a bit more complicated. It’s still is in an early stage, but it looks rather promising.
Posts Tagged: visual studio
19
Dec 07
Updating from Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2
About a month ago I was having some doubts if the upgrade from Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 to the final release would be a flawless task, fortunately Scott Guthrie came to the rescue.
19
Dec 07
Quick Tip: Stop a build in Team Foundation
Sometimes things go wrong during a build, after all Team Foundation isn’t bullet proof, and a build will remain in some intermediate state forever, which means you have stop the hard way. Fortunately, Team Foundation’s command line has a few more commands than Visual Studio’s interface, and stopping one of those builds is quite simple:
TfsBuild stop Server TeamProject BuildNumber
Ex:
TfsBuild stop http://your-tfs-server-here YourTeamProject BuildName
Technorati Tags: team foundation, build, build server
11
Dec 07
Volta

Any similarities between Bjork’s latest album and Microsoft’s latest toolkit for web development are just a pure coincidence.
20
Nov 07
Orcas is out!
Microsoft Releases Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5
Does this mean my Beta 2 of Orcas will stop working?
19
Nov 07
The fear of branches
The main discussion at work some time ago was the definition of the versioning policy to be used. Being a large multi-layered service framework, which is going to be used by several external applications in the near future, it’s extremely important to clearly define version roadmaps and how new features and bug fixes will be included in each version: basically a full blown version control that goes beyond just saving all source files in a CVS-like repository.
One of the main obstacles I’ve found around here is the fear of creating a branch. Like those people who have an irrational fear of snakes or spiders, some developers seem to have a basic, almost primal, fear of branching in source control, although their previous tool (*cough*Visual SourceSafe*cough*) justifies such fear. The problem is not really towards the branch itself, but how things will work out later when changes must be merged into the main development: changes will be lost, builds will be broken, everything will go wrong, total chaos and things must solved by hand. It couldn’t be more wrong, modern version control systems, like Microsoft Team Foundation or Subversion, can handle automatic merging quite well, even allow selective changesets to be merged in the main branch and making the process much less painful than some people think it is.
Technorati Tags: version control, source control, cvs, subversion, team foundation, sourcesafe
31
Oct 07
T4 Editor
Those of you that have been working with DSL tools or software factories lately have missed this piece of software from Clarius:
It works either with Visual Studio 2005 or 2008.
11
Aug 07
Opening Visual Studio Solutions with Launchy
For those those who have no idea what I’m writing about here’s a small brief: Launchy is a keyboard launcher loosely based on Quicksilver for Mac, and it’s a highly productive tool that allows, among many other useful tricks, to quickly launch all your favorite tools with just a couple of clicks, while avoiding a crowded Start Menu (I hardly use it nowadays).
Following the Lifehacker’s article on Launchy I though to post a little tweak targeted software developers, specially those who are usign Visual Studio, shown to me by fellow author at our “world’s best football club” tribute blog.
The trick is simple, the first thing to do is configure our project folders in Launchy:
- Open Launchy window (Alt+Space) and with right-click on it to open Directories window
- Now in the Directories window we’ll configure the root directories where our Visual Studio solutions are stored and, for each folder, configure the file extension Launchy will recognize (.sln for Visual Studio Solutions)
Setting the project folders
- Now, to fasten things a bit, we’ll force Launchy to re-index the folders, including the added ones: right-click on the main window and click Rebuild Index.
- And that’s it! Now Visual Studio solutions can be opened just by writing its name in Launchy.

Launch a Visual Studio Solution by writing its name
Technorati Tags: launchy, keyboard launcher
11
Jun 07
Microsoft’s answer to Eclipse?
Could this be Microsoft’s answer to Eclipse Platform? Maybe, but trusting on my experience with GAT/GAX it will still be easier to develop Eclipse plugins.

