VSNET - SeeSharp

VS.NET Designer Errors

HEskandari — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 15:01:00 GMT

Maintaining old applications has always been something painful for me. Old application, for me, means Winform applications using DataSets for binding operations. When converting and opening an old application, the least thing you want on your hands is to open a form and see Designer screen of death. This is due to the fact that in the WinForm world when you open a form, all the extra codes in the constructor and Load events will get executed, and this where things can go wrong. Think about a pieced of code in constructor of a form doing something innocent in nature like saving / loading data from registry, connecting to a service. Almost always VS.NET shows a cryptic message. How would you know which code / form / usercontrol is causing this?

Debugging the Designer

There are just a few steps to catch the buggy piece of code ruining your day. Open up your visual studio solution containing your application's code and compile. Locate the form that is breaking the designer. Open another instance of VS.NET and Goto "Tools" > "Attach To Process" and locate the process named "Devenv.exe" which is Visual Studio's process name. There are two processes named "Devenv". Make sure you select the one with loaded solution. To catch all the thrown exceptions go to "Debug" > "Exceptions" and check the column "Thrown" in front of "Common Language Runtime Exceptions". This will tell the VS.NET to catch all the exception thrown by CLR. At this point you're good to go. Switch to your VS.NET containing the solution and open the Form / Usercontrol. The exception will be caught so you can have a very good idea what the problem is.

It is very easy to avoid this.

Make sure the codes written in Form and Usercontrol constructors / OnLoaded / Loaded event (except for InitializeComponents in constructors) will not get executed.
Use the DesignMode property

If you're extending functionality of a custom control you need to be aware of this problem. The constructors of custom controls will be called in InitializeComponent anyway, so if there's something wrong with the code in there, you'll end up with this problem.

There's also an issue with the DesignMode property in UserControls. The design mode only works when the user control is Sited so you may be in design mode and get "False" value when checking DesignMode property. The trick is to use a property on System.ComponentModel.LicenseManager which is more reliable.

CodeRush Express : Free

HEskandari — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 16:20:00 GMT

DevExpress has just released a new version of their Visual Studio .NET add-in tool namingly "CodeRush Xpress". This version is Free! Some features refactorings available in this free versions :

Increase or Reduce Selection
Quick Navigation Window
Quick File Navigation
Duplicate Line
Highlight All References
Compress to Lambda Expression
Compress to Ternary Expression
Extract Method
Convert to Auto-implemented Property

Of couse all of them has been around in Resharper for quite some time now. Call me biased, but IMHO it doesn't come close to Resharper features, but doesn't cost you a dime to use! Also, not providing lots of feature and being small could be a good thing. any ideas?

Grab the installation and more information here.

Using full CPU power when building!

HEskandari — Tue, 06 May 2008 10:37:00 GMT

As Scott Hanselman points out in his blog fully, you can take advantage of all your CPU cores when building the solution using MSBuild.

Of course this is a luxury you get if you upgrade to Visual Studio 2008, and is not supported in older versions. Fortunately, since MSBuild in VS.NET 2008 (and the IDE itself) supports multitargetting, if you're still using .NET Framework 2.0 you can upgrade to VS.NET 2008 and benefit from this feature.

One thing to know before expecting faster build speeds, is to know the dependency tree of your Solution. If your projects are dependent on one another, you won't benefit much.

Scott also shows a hack to Visual Studio .NET to enable this feature when building solutions inside the IDE.

Cool Commands for VS.NET

HEskandari — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 10:40:00 GMT

I was taking a look at Gaston Milano's weblog the other day, and I saw that he has released a new version of his Cool Commands for VisualStudio.NET 2005. There are lots of useful things that should have been in the VS.NET in the first place, like Opening the folder of an item in the tree, etc. but most of all I like the new Resource Editor. Just select a text inside the code editor of the VS.NET and with a click of a mouse, you'll have an entry created in the your resource file!

I think this one will come in handy! Check out the blog post at http://weblogs.asp.net/gmilano/ where you can get the latest version of Cool Commands.