We hope you didn't miss the recent Visual Studio Live! event held on the Microsoft campus in Redmond, but if you did, you're in luck. There were several sessions recorded that are now available to watch on Microsoft's Channel 9. Here's a list of what's available, and a brief synopsis of each:
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Posted by Lafe Low on 09/11/20170 comments
Howdy readers, Lafe here. About once a month, my partner in crime, Rich Seeley, has been doing technical takeovers of this blog. Here's his latest post, which looks at the Live Unit Testing feature introduced in Visual Studio 2017.
Write the code. Stop. Test the code. Try to figure out where the bug is. Try out a fix. Test again. Maybe it works and maybe it doesn't. Maybe it will get through QA or maybe it won't.
This is what Joe Morris, senior program manager, Visual Studio and .NET Team, calls old school testing. None dare call it drudgery.
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Posted by Lafe Low on 09/07/20170 comments
Howdy readers, Lafe here. About once a month, my partner in crime, Rich Seeley, has been doing technical takeovers of this blog. Here's his latest post offering some resources for Visual Studio crashes.
Since the release of Visual Studio 2017, some users have been reporting crashes. In most cases, Microsoft folks offer workarounds and promises of fixes to come in the next patch or the next release.
But while you may expect a fix, it may not be a quick fix.
"I can see no apparent reason, but VS keeps crashing very often," one user reported on March 17, 2017 on the Visual Studio Developer Community help page. "It's practically unusable. I can see no pattern either. The window freezes and after a while Windows says it is not responding and restarts VS."
It took until April 20 for a workaround to be posted.
"We were able to isolate this to the pen/touch driver for dotnet crashing. (penimc.dll)," a Microsoft support person wrote. "We're working on this issue. You can try reinstalling .NET support in VS using the installer, or try disabling pen/touch support. I know these are not great workarounds and I'm not sure they'll actually avoid the issue for you - but we're looking into the underlying problem."
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Posted by Lafe Low on 08/17/20170 comments
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) continues to be a hot topic, especially with the growing movement toward DevOps. The subject has certainly evolved, as clearly demonstrated by the blend of ALM books examined here. There's a relatively basic title for those first getting involved in ALM, and far more specific and in-depth titles on applying ALM at a deeper level with TFS 2015, and even ALM specifically for APIs—nothing like a little light summer reading on the beach.
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Posted by Lafe Low on 08/03/20170 comments
Howdy readers, Lafe here. About once a month, my partner in crime, Rich Seeley, has been doing technical takeovers of this blog. Here's his latest post on Visual Studio debugging.
When it comes to Visual Studio debugging there's no sense sugar coating the chore.
"None of us gets paid to debug code," notes Kaycee Anderson, program manager for the Microsoft debugging team. “We get paid to write code. So the less time we spend debugging the better off we’ll be."
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Posted by Lafe Low on 07/27/20170 comments
Howdy readers, Lafe here. About once a month, my partner in crime, Rich Seeley, has been doing technical takeovers of this blog. Here's his most recent post, which looks at Visual Studio templates.
Visual Studio templates are in the news developers can use including two recent articles in one of our favorite sources Visual Studio Magazine.
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Posted by Lafe Low on 07/07/20170 comments
Howdy readers, Lafe here. About once a month, my partner in crime, Rich Seeley, has been doing technical takeovers of this blog. Here's his latest post on Visual Studio extensions.
Where would Visual Studio users be without extensions?
You'd probably be constantly re-inventing the wheel to do routine tasks instead of having extensions a click away. As Microsoft explains: "Extensions allow you to add new features to or integrate existing tools into Visual Studio. An extension can be as simple as adding grid lines to show indentation levels in the editor or as complex as a suite of tools specific to how your team works."
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Posted by Lafe Low on 06/16/20170 comments
Xamarin continues to drive the ever-expanding world of mobile apps. And as more dive into developing with Xamarin, more experts and expert resources are needed. Following up on my previous post, I've found some more fantastic Xamarin blogs you might want to visit.
This is a cool site that aggregates content from Xamarin community members. You have to subscribe to have it land in your RSS feed because they don't want to steal traffic from the community members' sites. That's a nice touch. You can get a preview of what’s available though. Once you do, chances are you'll want to subscribe.
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Posted by Lafe Low on 06/13/20170 comments
Howdy readers, Lafe here. About once a month, my partner in crime, Rich Seeley, has been doing technical takeovers of this blog. Here's his latest post, which takes a look at Visual Studio reporting.
So the company you are coding for wants a nice report showing how sales of their line of jeans featuring simulated motor oil and grease stains are selling in various markets. All the information they want is stored somewhere in the sales database. It's just a matter of getting all the names and numbers to line up right so the sales reps, managers, and executives can see how they're doing.
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Posted by Lafe Low on 05/26/20170 comments
If you missed our most recent Visual Studio Live! Washington, D.C. preview webcast on Tuesday, May 9, fear not. You can always log on and listen in here. Or even if you did attend this webcast, you can always listen again to review what was covered. Ben Hoelting gave us a free preview of his sessions coming up at the Washington, D.C. event on June 12-15. His webcast was entitled "Web Dev with MVVM and Aurelia: #VSLive Washington, D.C. Preview."
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Posted by Lafe Low on 05/23/20170 comments