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One of the ''fun'' things about working as an enterprise SI is being able to travel back in time. To eras long past and forgotten; left in the buried deep in the dust; unseen by modern civilization. We get to re-enter environments still operating with .NET Framework v1.0 or 1.1. ;-) It does not take long to understand that the technology ...

How is it that I forget the steps to accomplish such a simple task so frequently? Do I have a poor memory, or is Visual Studio's method for adding separators beween toolbar buttons just plain unintuitive? I blame Visual Studio. Here are the steps to once and for all prevent me from forgetting 1. Open the Customize dialog box for toolbars.2. ...

Want to be a more knowledgable developer by setting Visual Studio's output window to automatically focus upon activating the Build process? So that you can observe real-time details on what happens behind the scenes with MSBuild and the compilers? Well, curses to you for wanting to know so much! You should remain an unmotivated uninterested ...

I thought this would be a very common style of deployment. Why write thousands of lines of INSERT when you can prepare CSV data in quicker fashion and use the BULK INSERT command? Surely developers would want that. Well, the Visual Studio team apparently did not think so. They must have been rushing to push the fourth Team Edition for Visual ...

So today, or last night rather, I finally got down to seriously look at this wonder trinket the ASP.NET team provided as a cool add-in project for Visual Studio - Web Deployment Projects. The one true feature that really had me excited was the ability to define multiple sections in web.config as replaceable, so different builds for different ...

I used to print out scrolls of program code onto paper on a frequent basis. And when I did that, it was testament the previous programmer has failed a rather important guideline about the craft of programming. Well, not anymore. Apparently the developers at SlickEdit faced the same type of frustration as I did, and decided to automate it directly ...

The biggest hurdle to installing new software is the unavoidable demand (not just a mere requirement) to spend that sitting time to learn it considerably to be useful and productive with it. This factor is increased exponentially when it is the operating system that gets upgraded. After going through the Ironman journey of simply getting ...

My colleague hit a mysterious error message whenever she attempted to deploy the assembly compiled with our managed stored procedures to the SQL Server. An error occurred while gathering metadata from assembly 'Assembly.Name' with HRESULT 0x80004005. ProjectName It always failed at a particular stored procedure when it gives up, and she ...

Developers who begin to bloat the size of their assemblies destined for CLR-enabled SQL Server instances may be hit with the following timeout problem when attempting to deploy from Visual Studio to a remote server: Timeout expired.  The timeout period elapsed prior to completion of the operation or the server is not responding. This ...

In catching up with my blog reading, I was intrigued by Nikhil Kothari's Script# project and decided to check out just how cool developing client-side DHTML logic in all of Visual C# IDE goodness can get. This is one flooring concept that has potential to drastically alter how web (ASP.NET) developers look at Javascript. Script# is, however, a ...

Most of us have been taught to use the ''Visual Studio .NET 2003 (or 2005) Command Prompt'' launcher from the Visual Studio program group to setup the command prompt environment properly for .NET Framework SDK or Visual Studio work. With that a call to ''devenv'' from anywhere in the filesystem will have no trouble finding its way back to where ...

After developing and debugging ASP.NET sites for years now, I encounter a seemingly old yet rare issue that I have not been slapped with before. Running (F5) the web site off VS.NET 2003 yields the ''unable to start debugging on the web server. you do not have permissions to debug the server'' error message on my company laptop. Suggestion is to ...

Oftentimes debugging or code stepping involves crucial awareness of just what kind of data the program is currently dealing with. Visual Studio .NET by its stock self provides some Watch facilities to monitor objects and their properties while the program is midway in execution. Very useful, but terribly inadequate when needing to deal with ...

I can now rely on Mikhail Arkhipov's spell checker plug-in for VS 2005 and never fear straying too far. Thanks be.

If you ever wished (with tears) you had Intellisense to assist you with the myriad of options and settings possible in the web.config or app.config XML schema, get set to acknowledge RAD Software as your saviour. The bad news is, as explained in the article, you have to work a little each time you open and close the config files by respectively ...

Thank you Stephan Wissel, for recommending a great monospace alternative to the 8pt Courier format I use in Visual Studio and other text editors: ProFont ''Once you use it, you'll never turn back.'' Indeed. Download this 9pt-optimised font now for your editors: http://www.tobiasjung.net/profont/ ...