Using Mercurial with Visual Studio

Thursday, January 28th, 2010

Mercurial ships as a command line tool. Here are some UI based tools to make it work that much better on Windows and in Visual Studio. TortoiseHg – A Windows Explorer integration for Mercurial (You can download the latest versions of Mercurial and TortoiseHg from the Mercurial site) HgScc – A source ...

Gotchas: MSBuild Conditional Import Ignored by Visual Studio

Thursday, September 3rd, 2009

Here’s nasty little quirk of MSBuild and Visual Studio which took me some time to solve last night… I have a C# project file which has been modified to import a custom .targets file. This targets file in turn imports some settings (property and item groups) using the following ...

Setting up Subversion on Windows Home Server

Friday, November 21st, 2008

I've been thinking of other ways to put my Windows Home Server to good use and my recent trip to Florida got me exploring ways I could work on a couple of personal coding projects while traveling. Eventually much of this code may well get published on CodePlex but ...

Visual Source Safe and Distributed Teams

Monday, November 10th, 2008

One of the questions I got at the p&p Summit after my distributed agile development talk was, how do you use Microsoft Visual Source Safe (VSS) with distributed teams? This is an issue because VSS was never written with distribution in mind. The VSS client connects directly to the ...

Visual Studio Team System and Scrum Task Boards

Friday, September 19th, 2008

Teams at patterns & practices use Visual Studio Team System to run their projects. Here are a couple of approaches for getting a traditional Scrum or XP task board experience with Team System; creating paper task cards from Team System using Word's mail merge feature and the Conchango Scrum for ...

An xUnit.net Assert.Throws() Code Snippet

Tuesday, June 24th, 2008

I was mucking around with code snippets over the weekend - it killed the time in between feeling sick. As my unit testing framework of choice is XUnit I thought I've have a go at adding a snippet or two around that. xUnit already comes with a nice code snippet for ...

Visual Studio Startup Script

Sunday, June 22nd, 2008

Given that occasionally I'm prone to playing the odd game on my home computer I didn't want a lot of the services that are only used for development running all the time. Solution... use the Services tab in the Computer Management console and configure them to start manually. Then use ...

#region around implemented interfaces and code smell

Friday, April 18th, 2008

Some (not so) random surfing got me to this... How to get rid of the auto-generated #region for implemented interfaces - Daniel Cazzulino's Blog There's a setting in VS that allows you to turn off the #region generation when using VS's implement interface feature (ALT-SHIFT-F10). 99% of the time ...

Gotchas: SN.EXE problem on Vista fixed in VS 2008!

Tuesday, March 18th, 2008

Back in September I ran into some issues using SN.EXE on Vista. SN would look like it had added a strong name verification skipping entry when really it hadn't. Doing the SN -Vr *,######### with the SN.EXE tool that ships with Visual Studio 2008 gives a much better behavior.   ...

PHP and Visual Studio

Wednesday, March 12th, 2008

Recently I've been making some changes to some WordPress templates written in PHP. How did I edit my PHP files? Turns out that David Cumps has added coloring support for PHP Visual Studio 2008! Notepad2 also supports PHP coloring but doesn't copy/paste into LiveWriter with the coloring and doesn't allow you ...