How-To: Create a Visual Studio 2010 Code Snippet
As you work through various projects in Visual Studio 2010 you will find yourself reusing a lot of code. In fact, you may find yourself reusing a lot of the same static code, or code that follows a basic pattern. Visual Studio 2010 lets you cut out a lot of this wasted time by employing code snippets. Code snippets can generate basic code patterns or layouts on the fly inside your project. Today I will walk you through creating a basic code snippet for generating a C# class with specific section stubs.
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Using #region Effectively
The #region preprocessor directive can make your C# code very organized. It is a shame that so many coders do not learn to use #region early and often. Sure #region allows Visual Studio 2010 to collapse your code block down into one-line, but better yet it can be used to sort code by common sections. This provides a framework for other source files throughout your project to mimic. Today I wanted to cover how I like to sort my code in my projects.
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Visual Studio 2010 Document Previews
If you have used Visual Studio 2008 or the Visual Studio 2010 Betas you should remember a distinct feature. When you moved through documents inside the IDE with CTRL + TAB you would get a nice little preview of the documents you were flipping through. If you have used the latest version of Visual Studio 2010, you may have noticed that this feature has been pulled. Well you can restore it with a simple registry change!
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C# Preprocessor Directives
If you have ever worked with an application that bounces from your workstation, to QA, then to production the odds are high you have dealt with C# preprocessor directives. While C# does not have a preprocessing engine, these directives are treated as such. They have been named as such to be consistent with C and C++ for familiarity. Directives can be used to build classes based on the environment they will be deployed in, to grouping chunks of your source code together for collapsing inside the Visual Studio code editor. This article will go over each C# preprocessor directive.
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IronPython and C#
So the other day I wrote about dynamic types in C#. I covered a few use cases from COM interaction to working with other languages. Well, today I have put together an example for you that will load a Python file into C#, through IronPython.
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Dynamic Types in C#
When C# 4.0 was released, it added a new type for variables called dynamic. The dynamic type is a static type, but it is an object that bypasses static type checking. Now if your head has just exploded from reading that last sentence I apologize. When you compile an application that contains any dynamic types, those dynamic objects are assumed to support any operation that may be ran against them. This allows a developer to not worry about where a method is coming from be it XML, DOM, or other dynamic languages like IronPython. However, if at runtime a method or command does not exist errors will be thrown at run-time instead.
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Understanding Path Limits in TFS
Team Foundation Server (TFS) is bound to a some limitations that can potentially break your Visual Studio project. One of these limitations is the character count limit in a file path. If you overshoot this limit you will run into issue when adding new files to TFS or attempting to compile your project in Visual Studio. Here is a quick overview explaining why TFS behaves like this and what you can do about it.
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Solution Folders in Visual Studio 2010 Explained
If you are new to Visual Studio, you may not be familiar with how “Solution Folders” work. Visual Studio allows you to group together any number of sub-projects that your root solution may contain. However, what is strange about Solution Folders in Visual Studio is that they do not create the same logical structure on your disk. Solution Folders will not create a mirror on your hard drive. They just create a logical grouping inside your Visual Studio Project. They will not move files around, or create directories for your projects when you create Solution Folders and place your projects inside them. It is a good practice to have your logical project structure to have a one-to-one relationship with your physical directory structure, and the behavior of the Solution Folders do not follow this. But there is a way for Visual Studio to create the physical structure on the disk when adding projects to the solution.
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