lyon-smith.org

I recently had the need/desire to dynamically generate some code in .NET.  It's not something you tend to do a lot unless you are creating a compiler, so it was an interesting experience.  In the end it didn't solve my problem, but it was educational none-the-less. First I'll describe the scenario of the problem I was trying to solve ...

OK, in my opinion this is a bit more than a power tool - it's an entire product.  If you are using Team System you need to download and set up the Team System Web Access Power Toy that we just released.  Team System Web Access (formerly known as TeamPlain) is a Web interface to Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server.  We are ...

Don't ask why, but I needed to list all the properties of all the projects in a solution.  Here's the macro that did it for me: Sub ListProjectProperties() Dim pane As EnvDTE.OutputWindowPane pane = Utilities.GetOutputWindowPane(''Output'') Dim projects As EnvDTE.Projects projects = ...

Here's another useful VS macro.  When I write code there are always weird edge cases that I think of while so I like to liberally sprinkle // TODO: comments around.  When you do this though you should always put in your alias and the date.  That way someone who comes across your comment knows who to ask for further details, or ...

Vista problem reporting is a great idea for end users, but it really gets in the way if you are a software developer.  You know what I'm talking about right?  You run your program, which then proceeds to throw an exception and now, instead of throwing up the old ''Application Exception'' dialog, or the ability to launch the program in ...

I was just informed by one of my colleagues that there is a hidden feature in Visual Studio to add guidelines into the text editor.  Guidelines are virtical dotted lines that show character column boundaries.  This is useful if you are formatting something to fit in 80 or 120 characters.  Not that this is ...

The VS marketing folks have just launched a new campaign call Defy All Challenges.   Go check out the videos.  Very Red vs. Blue. ''There are currently two parties on the call, a Mummy and a Unicorn... A drunken pirate has joined the call.''

Sometimes obvious things elude me.  My colleague, Steve Steiner, just pointed out that if you go to Tools, Options..., Fonts and Colors and change the setting for Visible White Space under the settings for Text Editor to a more subtle color, like Silver you can leave the Edit, Advanced, View White Space setting on all the time without going ...

Some things that should be easy are still much harder than they should be.  One of those things is writing macros and add-ins for Visual Studio. The object hierachy is (a) obfuscated by a COM/managed interop mess (b) not logically or consistently laid out (c) hard to debug, (d) full of subtle bugs and weird behaviors. Today I ...

One of the most useful macros I ever wrote in VS was but a single line.  All it does is insert a GUID at the current selection point.  It was so useful I wrote it twice; once to insert lowercase and once to insert uppercase GUIDs.  Here it is:Imports System Imports EnvDTE Imports EnvDTE80 Imports System.Diagnostics Public ...