For quite a long time, our team chose not to mess with our working TeamCity configurations, which compile, build, test, and deploy our code several times a day. Two weeks ago, we finally upgraded our last and at the same time biggest project discoverize to work with Visual Studio 2017. This allowed us to take a fresh look at the *cough* new C# language features that we have been ignoring for the last few years. But using any of them also meant having to upgrade our continuous integration infrastructure to support them. Here's what we've done. Update all TeamCity configurations If you use the MSBuild runner, now choose the Microsoft Build Tools 2017 as the MSBuild version and set the MSBuild ToolsVersion to 15.0: This will lead to the error that no Build Agents can be found for the given configuration because a requirement is not met: MSBuildTools15.0_x64_Path cannot be found. Install new Build Tools Thanks to this Stackoverflow answer I quickly learned that I had to install the Build Tools for Visual Studio 2017. You can get the web installer from here. More information about the options in the tool can be found on this page. The first screen shows the possible workloads (as of August 2017) with Web development build tools selected… … and the second screen shows the individual components selected (I actually unchecked all optional .NET Framework targeting packs): Restart the TeamCity Agent Service For TeamCity to realize that you've installed new tools on you build machine, you need to restart the Agent Service. You can find it e.g. after running services.msc from the Start menu –> Run command. Missing AllRules.ruleset file Now, the compilation of our C# 6 project finally succeeded. There was still one problem: the build log contained warnings about a AllRules.ruleset file missing. I just went ahead and copied the file from my local machine (including the full folder hierarchy) because I could not find any information on where to find this file other than on my own machine (with Visual Studio installed). After that last step, the build log is finally black again.   Happy configuring!

Lately, I've been having a hard time with my Visual Studio installation because one day it just out of nowhere started crashing during startup. Starting VS with the /SafeMode flag avoided the crash but wasn't of much help to do major work since all my R# syntax highlighting and refactoring tools are not available in safe mode. First Try: Reset All Your Settings The first time I encountered the problem I found this answer on stackoverflow.com  helpful which suggests to: Reset all your Visual Studio settings by calling devenv /resetsettings from a command line prompt or after hitting the Windows key. Delete the folders %LocalAppData%\Microsoft\VisualStudio and %LocalAppData%\Microsoft\VSCommon Second Try: Uninstall GitExtensions Today, VS started crashing again and I was just happy with resetting all of my fine-tuned settings AGAIN. Luckily, a google search brought up this thread on the NCrunch forum and since I use NCrunch for test execution I went to have a look Here's what Simon had to say there: I'm thinking the problem was a GIT plugin installed by GitExtensions - I've read other reports about it causing problems, so I've removed it and things seem stable so far. To verify whether this was true in my case I just went ahead and uninstalled GitExtensions via the Control Panel – and Visual Studio would happily start again! What a relief. But I Still Want To Use GitExtensions… After uninstalling, go get the installer again (did you know there's a standalone version without msysgit and kdiff?) and during install unselect all the Visual Studio plugins like this: UPDATE: Keep Even GitExtensions' VS Plugin! A commenter to my answer to the VS crash problem on stackoverflow suggested that unchecking the option "Show current branch in Visual Studio" in GitExtensions under Tools –> Settings –> Appearance fixed the VS crashes for him: I used this hint to reactivate the GitExtensions VS plugin on my machine as well, because I use some of its features quite often. Now, you should be good to go! I'll try to get back to work now while my VS is running… Happy coding!

This post is one of several summarizing some of the sessions I attended during the .NET Developer Days conference in October 2014. Check out the rest of them. Here are my notes from a whole day of sessions diving deep into Visual Studio and its possibilities, lead by Kate Gregory: Window positioning When drag'n'dropping windows you can drop them in any place you like, even in a place where VS suggests to dock it to another window group, by holding down the CTRL key and then releasing the mouse button. Using the Start Page Probably 3% of all developers use it but it's gotten better over the years. You can now pin projects to it so they won't fall of the most recently used list, you can remove unneeded projects by right clicking or open its folder if you forgot where you keep it. Also, the start age hides itself once you open a project or a file so you don't have to close it by hand anymore. Navigating Code If you want to go to the definition of a symbol just get your cursor on it and press F12 which is the shortcut for Go To Definition. That will open the file that contains the definition of given symbol. Now, if you want to drill down into a deeper hierarchy and don't care for the intermediate definitions, give Alt+F12 a try – it's the shortcut for Peek Definition and it will open the definition of the given symbol in an iframe type of window right inside the code you're looking at. You can then use that window to follow further definitions without leaving the current point of interest. [Can't find that menu item in the Express edition, though.] Also, give bookmarks a try! There's a bookmark manager where you can give your bookmarks a name, group them into folders and the like. Quite helpful to quickly find your way around a large codebase or for presentations. Finding things There's great inline find window by now in VS that you can control from your keyboard in no time. Use Ctrl+F to open it with the word prefilled that your cursor is currently on or use Ctrl+F3 to search for the next occurrence of the word your cursor is on. This little tool is really worth getting to know well because it can save you a lot of time when looking for stuff or replacing it. Have you noticed the search text box at the top of the Solution Explorer? There's even a shortcut to get there so you don't have to take your hand off the keyboard. Be prepared to find even more search boxes here and there, e.g. the Error List has one, too! Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Visual Studio Online is a new one-stop solution for hosting projects and collaborating on them in the cloud. It basically offers cloud-based TFS instances. The basic plan is free for up to 5 users in a project with an unlimited number of stakeholders, who are allowed view burndown charts, backlogs, Kanban, and task boards, and may even create new Work Items. It supports, of course, TFVC but also Git for source control. In Visual Studio, use the Team Explorer window to work with your remote TFS, e.g. your Visual Studio Online account, but you can choose to manage your project through a web browser just as well. There's powerful work item editor available online, have a look and take a minute to grasp what all it offers: I'd call it impressive. There's really a ton of features here, and no doubt there are other tools out there to do the same thing. What really cuts it for me: Visual Studio Online is free for up to 5 users and an unlimited number of stakeholders. The integration with Visual Studio is seamless. [You can do pretty much all of the management work either in VS or online.] Sign out of VisualStudio.com If you're logged into VisualStudio.com you can log out by opening the drop-down menu next to your login name, choosing "Account settings…" and there clicking "Sign out". Beware that you have to be logged in with a Microsoft account if you want to use the Express version for longer than 30 days. Debugging I'll just put stuff into a list here for better readability: Have you  met the Autos window? Seems not to be included in the Express version but when hitting a breakpoint it offers insight into all variables used on the current line, the previous line and after exiting a function, shows its return value even if you didn't assign to any variable! The Locals window captures the values of all variables defined in the current scope without the need to add them to the Watch window. Press the CTRL key to temporarily hide the variable inspector popup window: -> Pin values from the above window so you'll keep their values in view – even during the next debugging session! Set your cursor on a line of code and choose Run To Cursor from the context menu to continue running your code up until the line with the cursor. Wow! Or choose Set Next Statement to skip all code from the current breakpoint onwards and jump to the selected line. Wow²! Edit + Continue is also great but works only in 32-bit mode :-| IntelliTrace (in the Ultimate edition) allows you to capture execution traces of your software on a client machine and debug (through replaying) the same set of instructions inside your local VS – Kate Gregory called it Time Travel Debugging ;-) That's it from the first day. Happy developing!

Lately, I was having trouble debugging certain parts of my code in Visual Studio, and all I wanted to know was the value of some variable at some point in time. Well, I’d use some logging if I could just get at that value easily. But for some objects I don’t really know what I’m looking for or where I should be looking for it. So just give me the values of all the members of that object, will ya? And could you recurse that? But no deeper than 3 levels, alright? Or let’s say… 5? public static string ToDebugString(this object obj, int maxdepth, int depth=0) { if (obj == null) return "null";   if (obj is IConvertible) return obj.ToString();   if (depth >= maxdepth) return "...";   var sb = new StringBuilder();   if (depth > 0) sb.AppendLine();   foreach (var propertyInfo in obj.GetType().GetProperties(BindingFlags.Public|BindingFlags.Instance)) { sb.Append(new string(' ', 2*depth)).Append(propertyInfo.Name).Append(": "); try { var value = propertyInfo.GetValue(obj, new object[0]); sb.AppendLine(ToDebugString(value, maxdepth, depth + 1)); } catch (Exception ex) { sb.AppendLine(string.Format("[{0}]", ex.Message)); } }   // remove newline from end of string var newLine = Environment.NewLine; if (sb.Length >= newLine.Length) sb.Replace(newLine, "", sb.Length - newLine.Length, newLine.Length);   return sb.ToString(); } With this little helper I can now simply call anyobject.ToDebugString(4 /* maxdepth */) and I get a nicely formatted debug view of that object; e.g. Request.Url.ToDebugString(3) gives me: AbsolutePath: /logg.aspxAbsoluteUri: http://localhost:55235/logg.aspxAuthority: localhost:55235Host: localhostHostNameType: DnsIsDefaultPort: FalseIsFile: FalseIsLoopback: TrueIsUnc: FalseLocalPath: /logg.aspxPathAndQuery: /logg.aspxPort: 55235Query: Fragment: Scheme: httpOriginalString: http://localhost:55235/logg.aspxDnsSafeHost: localhostIsAbsoluteUri: TrueSegments: Length: 2 LongLength: 2 Rank: 1 SyncRoot: Length: 2 LongLength: 2 Rank: 1 SyncRoot: ... IsReadOnly: False IsFixedSize: True IsSynchronized: False IsReadOnly: False IsFixedSize: True IsSynchronized: FalseUserEscaped: FalseUserInfo: Nice Right now this method chokes on indexed properties but once I’ll need it I’ll go and look for a way to include them. It also chokes any exceptions on the way to just get the job done. Happy coding!

Recently, we encountered a quite surprising behavior of MSBuild – the continuous integration build of our new collaborative Todo Management app (we hope to go into beta soon!) would produce a broken version whereas the local build with VS2010 was all smooth and well. Our admin and tester already posted about this problem over at his blog: MSBuild does not build like Visual Studio 2010. The exception message finally led me down the right path: Server Error in '/' Application. No constructors on type 'Teamaton.TodoCore.Repositories.TodoRepositoryJson' can be found with 'Public binding flags'. Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where it originated in the code. Exception Details: Autofac.Core.DependencyResolutionException: No constructors on type 'Teamaton.TodoCore.Repositories.TodoRepositoryJson' can be found with 'Public binding flags'. The TodoRepositoryJson is a type we used at the very beginning of our development to quickly get started using a JSON document as data store. Later we switched to SQLite, so now we have another implementation: TodoRepositoryDb. Both implement the same interface ITodoRepository. Turns out, the Autofac type registering code was the culprit: 1: var builder = new ContainerBuilder(); 2: builder.RegisterAssemblyTypes(typeof (Todo).Assembly) 3: .Where(t => t.Name.Contains("Repository")) 4: .AsImplementedInterfaces() 5: .InstancePerLifetimeScope(); What worked with Visual Studio, didn’t work with MSBuild: obviously – well, now it is – both ITodoRepository implementations were registered with Autofac, and while Autofac’s assembly scanning delivered them in the order we assumed from the DLL built with VS  – first, TodoRepositoryJson, and second, TodoRepositoryDb, thus overriding the first registration – MSBuild seems to build a DLL which returns the inverse order! Very strange. Honestly, I’m not familiar with the anatomy of DLLs and surprised by this result. But it’s the only explanation I’ve found so far. Well, the solution to the problem is, of course, to care more about what we register with Autofac and in which order. Happy coding, Oliver

Macht das Leben leichter:

Wir befuellen ja haeufig im Frontend einen Repeater. Das einfaedeln der DataSource und das Erstellen und Verknuepfen des EventHandlers fuer ItemDataBound bekommt man mit IntelliSense innerhalb weniger Sekunden hin. Aber wenn man dann den Befuell-Code schreibt, geht es immer wieder los: Wie waren gleich nochmal die ersten 3 Zeilen? Damit ist jetzt Schluss. Einfach die Datei "repeater.snippet" in "Documents/Visual Studio 2008/Code Snippets/Visual C#/My Code Snippets" des Nutzers mit dem man VS ausfuehrt kopieren. Leider zeigt die ReSharper-IntelliSense den Shortcut nicht an, funktionieren tut es trotzdem. Man tippe: rpt [ESC] [TAB] Der Rest versteht sich von selbst: repeater.snippet (1,03 kb)

Eine kleine Notiz für die Zukunft: Wenn man eine Configuration-Section aus einer *.config-Datei in eine eigene Datei auslagert, so wie neulich geschehen für die NHibernate-Konfiguration, dann sollte man die "Copy to Output Directory"-Option auf "Copy Always" setzen: <!-- Lokal eine passende NH.config anlegen --> <hibernate-configuration configSource="NH.config" /> Ansonsten bekommt man nämlich eine der folgenden ähnliche Fehlermeldung: System.Configuration.ConfigurationErrorsException: Die configSource-Datei "NH.config" kann nicht geöffnet werden. (G:\Projects\Camping.Info\Tests\bin\Debug\Tests.dll.config line 12) Oliver

um vernünftig debuggen zu können, ist es nötig das Exception in Visual Studio, unter "Debug"->"Exceptions" "Common Language Runtime Exception" zu aktivieren. Ist jedoch "Enable Just My Code" (unter "Tools"->"Options" und dann im Bereich Debugging) nicht angewählt...   ... dann fehlt im Exeptions Windows ...   ... die "User-unhandeld" Spalte.   etwas unerklärlich, aber per Default war bei uns (Oliver und mir) anscheinend "Thrown" für Common Language Runtime Exceptions nicht ausgewählt Nachdem "Thrown" expliziet aktiviert wurde, sprang der Debugger in alle Exceptions auch "User handled" Exceptions. Also auch in evil "Try Catch" Blöcke. Die Lösung ist es nun "Enable Just My Code" zu aktivieren: Vielleicht hilft es :-)