Over the years that I have been working as a .NET developer and consultant for a large number of different customers, I picked up a lot of simple, yet effective productivity tricks. As of today, there is a new category on my blog called “.NET Power Tips”. I represents a growing list of tips related […]
Copying and pasting is an essential part of every developers life. It is so essential that you can even buy a book with instructions: Ok, jokes aside, Visual Studio offers a great feature called the Cycle Clipboard ring: The clipboard ring remembers every piece of text that you cut or copy from the text editor. […]
I watch many developers deleting and copying code lines in Visual Studio in an unnecessary complicated procedure. They place the cursor inside the line that they need to delete, cut or copy. Then they use either the mouse or the keyboard to expand the selection to the entire line. With the keyboard, that would be: […]
Usually, when selecting text in a text editor, the text is selected line by line. This means that if I would hold the mouse button in the middle of a line and drag down, the selection would automatically select the current line to the end and continue with the next line. With block selection it […]
There is an interesting function in Visual Studio hidden in the options menu: Scroll Bar Map Mode. Going to TOOLS –> OPTIONS –> TEXT EDITOR –> ALL LANGUAGES –> SCROLL BARS the scroll bar style can be changed to map mode. There is a shortcut to activate the map mode: Just go to the Quick […]
You might be familiar with the standard search functionality in Visual Studio accessible via CTRL-F. Personally, I hardly use it. There is a better alternative: FIND IN FILES. Find in Files can be started with the shortcut CTRL-SHIFT-F. It will open a search window, as usual. The difference is that on enter, it will NOT […]
A very useful but little kn own window in VS2015 is the Call Hierarchy Window. It can be used to find dependencies of a method or another member of a class. Executing VIEW CALL HIERARCHY WINDOW (CTRL-K, T) opens the window: In the image, we take a closer look at the AddChild() method. A tree […]
This power tip introduces a couple of shortcuts that can be used to navigate through code files in Visual Studio. I am often surprised about how many developers don’t know or don’t use some of the most basic shortcuts. Note that the mentioned key bindings can be different in your edition of Visual Studio. […]
Very often, .NET applications need to convert images. Meet ImageMagick! What is Image Magick? Say you have an image of the hulk in JPG format that you want to convert: hulk.jpg How would you programmatically convert this image in to another format, say *.png? ImageMagick does the trick: And thats it! […]
I stumble upon this one recently and I always need to google it to get the syntax right. So this blog post is primarily a reminder for myself. But hey, its a great tip and it could be useful to many people. Assume that you have a web application hosted in Internet Information Services (IIS) […]
There is one extension to Visual Studio that you ABSOLUTELY NEED!!! And its the Productivity Power Tools. Go to TOOLS –> EXTENSIONS AND UPDATES and get it from the gallery. You will find it for any VS version that you are working with and its totally free! https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/34ebc6a2-2777-421d-8914-e29c1dfa7f5d The visual studio team who wrote the […]
Say, you have a .NET Project with a lot of assemblies in the project output and you don’t like it. For your personal reasons, you would like to just deliver one assembly that contains your entire project. There are several ways to do so. This post presents three methods: ILMerge.exe, Embedded Resource and AppDomain.ResolveAssembly and […]
This .NET Power Tip makes me bang my head against the wall over and over again! How many times have I watched developers write line after line of C# code to create a structure that matches the structure of an XML or JSON document in classes? I can tell you, it was not just once […]
The configuration part of Log4Net often causes severe headaches. Most of the times, a small mistakes prevents any log output at all. By adding the following snippet to your projects config file, log4net will print out its diagnostics information that often helps to pinpoint any problems: 1. Set debug=”true” in the first line of your […]
Sometimes you need a directory or some files within your Visual Studio Solution that you do NOT want to check-in into TFS Source control. However, Visual Studio will detect the files and Team Explorer will show you that there are detected changes: These files are not only annoying but also confusing to some developers. Using […]