I was trying to write that post for so long that I've started worry that there will be new version of the Visual Studio before I will even start. Finally, I found some time and here it is. What I'm going to write about here is how to use the latest IDE to work with a .NET 1.1 applications. Before...

I've been burned by a few bugs recently due to swallowed exceptions. In case you don't know, empty catch blocks will hurt you. Really, they will. I wanted a way to locate all of the empty blocks in our code base, I was playing around with NDepend and the amazing Code Query Language , but it's...

Last week or so, I stumbled on to the site for the Visual Studio 2008 Demo Challenge . The gist of the contest is to make a video explaining why VS 2008 is great, and then win stuff. Your video is played backed in a Silverlight app that your host at silverlight.live.com. So I make a video, and I think...

I've finally installed Visual Studio 2008 RTM. It takes me two days. Well, not installing itself of course. I had to uninstall Beta 2 before, then I realised I have a lot of unused software I can uninstall as well. Then I found number of old software that can (and if can then should) be upgraded...

I'm such a wannabe ReSharper padawan . My motivation is good though: I want to be more productive. On a recent project, I was writing some code in front of a client employee, a novice developer himself, and he exclaimed "The code is just writing itself." I learned a long time ago that I...

The Silverlight is the great tool to do presentation layer for web applications. Things like diagrams, charts, schemas etc. I will stop myself here. There is a lot sources about where the Silverlight can be used so I will leave that to your imagination. I would like to show a short sample how to create...

Writing specification and documentation is one of the biggest issues for most developers. We are rather technical persons and writing twenty sentences to describe something that exist in our mind as a code is sometimes painful process. This is why I'm always looking for good examples and using them to...

Last month I'm focusing almost only on Continuous Integration. Number of hours spent on that subject allows me to pretend be advanced. So far all my CI experience was limited to CruiseControl.NET (95%) and a bit of Team Foundation Server. A problem with setting up CI using TFS is well known and there...

Scott Guthrie talks about how to speed up build times for Visual Studio 2005 .. It's a great read, and definitely something to know inside and out if you're doing ASP.NET development with VS 2005. You've got to hand it to a person in his position doing down and dirty blog posts to help us...

I've spent the past few days speaking with some folks at Microsoft about the problems I've been experiencing with VS 2005's performance. They've given me some great pointers and information about what's going on behind the scenes with VS that could be causing some slowness. I'm...