Recently Microsoft and DevExpress announced that CodeRush Express is now free, which is a nice thing.

After watching Dustin Campbell’s session @ PDC 2008 on Visual C# IDE Tips and Tricks, I thought of compiling this highly useful list of things that developers can use to develop stuff quicker in Visual Studio. In the list below, CRX means CodeRush Express.

1. Code Definition Window: Dynamically loads up C# class view of any class that you doubleclick in the Source Editor window
2. Ctrl+shift+7 and Ctrl+Shift+8 - Navigation through ‘go to definition’
3. Navigate through all references - F8 (after you do find all references)
4. Track active item in solution explorer - set this in Tools->Options->Projects and Solutions
5. Source code outliner power toy - show code view hierarchy, can also be used to navigate around code 
6. Ctrl+Alt+F - Go to file - Quick file navigation
7. Ctrl+Shift+Q - find symbol
8. Go to open file (Ctrl+Alt+down)
9. Highlight usages of a variable - Ctrl+Alt+U (CRX)
10. Use code snippets, create your own
11. Smart tag - add using namespaces - Ctrl + .
12. Ctrl+Alt+ + for selecting code hierarchically Ctrl+Alt+ - lesson selection - Expand Shrink Selection (CRX)
13. DebuggerDisplay attribute on top of the class
14. Ctrl + ~ for refactoring (CRX)
15. Solution wide TODO tasks in VS 08
16. Ctrl+K+X to bring up code snippets
17. Alt+ arrow keys to move the caret between Camel/Pascal cased text (Use Shift+Alt arrows to select those as well) (CRX)
18. Name anonymous type - Ctrl+`

Some of the key technologies and announcements:

1. Azure cloud computing services platform 
2. Windows 7 showcase
3. Visual Studio 2010 showcase (Videos and Screencasts on VS 10)
4. Oslo  and M language (Videos and Screencasts on Oslo)
5. .Net 4.0 (Video on C# 4.0 features)
6. JQuery intellisense in Visual Studio
7. Silverlight outside the browser
8. WPF Toolkit with Office Ribbon  and Visual State manager for WPF
9. Silverlight Toolkit

There were lot of very interesting and relevant sessions for developers. My favorite is Scott Hanselman’s session, where he showcased his BabySmash (ISV as he calls it) and used all the different technologies (FoodCourt analogy) and got people really interested. His presentation skills are awesome and the excitement he brings to the developer crowd is immense. As LazyCoder pointed out on twitter stream, we are looking forward to Scott Hanselman doing the developer keynote @ PDC2010.

Anyway, I’ve watched most of these sessions @ microsoftpdc.com and rest of them will be catching up later next week.

So here’s a list of sessions that would be interesting for people with similar background as mine.

1. Microsoft .NET Framework: Overview and Applications for Babies by Scott Hanselman
2. Microsoft Visual Studio: Customizing and Extending the Development Environment
3. Microsoft Silverlight, WPF and the Microsoft .NET Framework: Sharing Skills and Code
4. Managed Extensibility Framework: Overview
5. Microsoft Visual C# IDE: Tips and Tricks
6. Microsoft Expression Blend: Tips & Tricks
7. Coding4Fun: Windows Presentation Foundation Animation, YouTube, iTunes, Twitter, and Nintendo’s Wiimote
8. WPF Roadmap
9. WPF: Data-centric Applications Using the DataGrid and Ribbon Controls
10. The Future of C#
11. ASP.NET MVC: A New Framework for Building Web Applications
12. Agile Development with Microsoft Visual Studio
13. Visual Studio Debugger Tips & Tricks
14. A Lap around “Oslo”
15. “Oslo”: Customizing and Extending the Visual Design Experience
16. “Oslo”: Repository and Models

1. Set the Thrown checkbox on CLR exceptions (atleast that, you can do the rest of them too like win32 etc) in the Debug->Exceptions dialog in Visual Studio

2. Set the ‘Show External Code’ on the context menu in the Call stack tool window in Visual Studio

Tip: Add your product title and logo to the Splash screen and Help->About of Visual Studio, when developing VSX Package.

1. Implement IVsInstalledProduct interface on the VSPackage class
2. Provide bitmap logo as icon resource in the VSPackage.resx
3. set the ‘useInterface’ parameter of the InstalledProductRegistration attribute to ‘true’; this attribute is on top of the VSPackage class

A sample code listing for the IVsInstalledProduct interface implementation

#region IVsInstalledProduct Members
//This interface members will provide splash screen,
// help->about related product information
//Thus InstalledProduct attribute on top of the
// VSPackage class has UseInterface set to true
public int IdBmpSplash(out uint pIdBmp)
{
    pIdBmp = 402;
    return VSConstants.S_OK;
}

public int IdIcoLogoForAboutbox(out uint pIdIco)
{
    pIdIco = 402;
    return VSConstants.S_OK;
}

///
/// Show both Product name and version on the splash screen
///
public int OfficialName(out string pbstrName)
{
    pbstrName = GetResourceString("@110");
    return VSConstants.S_OK;
}

public int ProductDetails(out string pbstrProductDetails)
{
    pbstrProductDetails = GetResourceString("@112");
    return VSConstants.S_OK;
}

///
/// ProductId is stored in the VsPackage.resx
/// Please change it everytime you change the release version
///
public int ProductID(out string pbstrPID)
{
    // If we provide the version here, then we can't
    // get the version on the splash screen,
    // as VS only gets the splash screen product string
    // from OfficialName method above
    // So the version has been added to the resource 110
    pbstrPID = GetResourceString("@125");
    return VSConstants.S_OK;
}

///
/// Gets resource string from the VsPackage.resx resource file
///
public string GetResourceString(string resourceName)
{
    string returnValue = String.Empty;
    IVsResourceManager resourceManager =
       (IVsResourceManager)this.GetService(typeof(SVsResourceManager));
    if (null != resourceManager)
    {
        Guid packageGuid = this.GetType().GUID;
        int hresult = resourceManager.LoadResourceString(ref packageGuid,
            -1, resourceName, out returnValue);
    }
    return returnValue;
}
#endregion

Click here to find detailed instructions on this

I call it euphoria because it’s the scent of ARR’s new music that is unique and you are on a marathon to keep listening to it not getting enough, till you drop. I started listening this morning, I haven’t stopped yet and will be like this for next days and weeks and will turn in to long term peace.

Let’s go down the track list now.

Main Hoon Yuvvraaj - Not much to talk about, except that music is Beethovan’s not ARR’s.

Tu Meri Dost Hai - This is a classic in this album. Benny Dayal and Shreya have sung it passionately. Interludes are awesome.

Shano Shano - I think this was Ghai’s doing, and ARR had to provide something ’supposedly’ pep club song thrown in. May be it is situational, let’s hope.

Tu Muskura - This is the ‘theme’ of Yuvvraaj, appearing in Manmohini and Dil Ka Rishta as well. Another classic.

Mastam Mastam - Middle-eastern or african feel and lots of instruments thrown in. Makes for good listening and grows on you after a while. Sonu is superb.

Zindagi - Srinivas reminds me of his other songs sung for ARR before. The tune is very melodius and has an ‘old song’ feel to it. After 2 minutes in to it, the orchestration grows to a new level and has that ARR punch.

Dil Ka Rishta - Awesome orchestration, beautiful interludes, I am on repeat, one of the best track in the album.

Manmohini Morey - Classical vocal on rhythms, I fell in love with this at first hearing and Vijay Prakash excels in his rendition. Unfortunately just when you think things are getting interested, the song fades away to end. I thought like the song could have been fullblown but chopped off for some reason.

Shano - Remix - Good remix, that’s all I can say

My favorite tracks are Dil Ka Rishta, Mahmohini, Tu Meri Dost Hai and Tu Muskura in that order

ARR has proven again that he has experiementation going for him, music after music, the last 3 years have been phenomenal. Just take ‘New York Nagaram’ for example, who can come up with such an innovative track? Simply can’t. Only ARR can.

God bless him with long life to keep producing world class music.

PS: By the way, ARR is  A. R. Rahman, the magical musician ]]> http://stackpanel.com/blog/2008/10/yuvvraaj-initial-euphoria/feed/ http://stackpanel.com/blog/2008/10/client-timeout-accessing-asmx-web-service/ http://stackpanel.com/blog/2008/10/client-timeout-accessing-asmx-web-service/#comments Tue, 14 Oct 2008 16:15:01 +0000 Vin http://stackpanel.com/blog/?p=127 I had a console utility generating a bunch of content files, that are accessing an asmx web service method to do the job. The utility ran fine for many days in production, but it started timing out yesterday.

The exception message read ‘Operation has timed out’. After checking on the IIS I upped the Timeout in the Properties dialog to 900 seconds. That didn’t help either.

Finally figured out that the webservice proxy class on the client also has a Timeout property that needs to be updated. As I updated it to 10 minutes, the utility was able to generate the content files without timing out.

MyWebSvcProxyClass myProxy = new MyWebSvcProxyClass();
// it's a client side timeout set to 10 minutes
myProxy. Timeout = 600000;

More on this: http://www.dotnetbips.com/articles/1d925079-5e0f-4098-a30f-a7dbbb311330.aspx

• ProjectBase.Files along with the parent “Project” folder does not belong to the Visual Studio SDK 1.1. It is now available as a separate download from Codeplex as MPF. You will need to update the base paths in your custom project files to point to the new location (wherever you place the MPF files) - The whole Project folder is no more part of the SDK, it has been moved to codeplex as a community project MPF

Visual Studio Managed Package Framework for Projects (MPFProj)
http://www.codeplex.com/mpfproj/SourceControl/ListDownloadableCommits.aspx
The ProjectBase.Files is the key file that needs to be added as an import to your VSX package project file
<Import Project=”$(ProjectBasePath)\ProjectBase.Files” />
ProjectBasePath is the location of the MPF Source

• As a result of the above change, classes like ProjectFactory, ProjectNode, VsMenus are now in a different namespace called Microsoft.VisualStudio.Project.ProjectFactory (Old namespace was Microsoft.VisualStudio.Package)

Wait a minute, what is StackOverflow you ask, well.. as per the ‘About’ section of the site,

Stack Overflow is a programming Q & A site that’s free. Free to ask questions, free to answer questions, free to read, free to index, built with plain old HTML, no fake rot13 text on the home page, no scammy google-cloaking tactics, no salespeople, no JavaScript windows dropping down in front of the answer asking for $12.95 to go away. You can register if you want to collect karma and win valuable flair that will appear next to your name, but otherwise, it’s just free. And fast. Very, very fast.

Stack Overflow is by programmers, for programmers, with the ultimate intent of collectively increasing the sum total of programming knowledge in the world. No matter what programming language you use, or what operating system you call home — better programming is our goal. With the help of software engineers like you, we can fill the world with good answers to every imaginable programming question.

Well, the ones that have answers, anyway.

We plan to make Stack Overflow as frictionless and painless to use as we possibly can. We believe finding the right answer to your programming questions should be as easy as falling into the pit of success.

And maybe even a little fun.

Currently it’s in a private beta and will soon by next month will be made public. I think this is going to be huge for the developer community. It’s so simple, fast, elegant and more importantly very useful, lots of learning to do. It’s very addictive as well.

It’s a private beta right now; you can sign up and on a FIFO basis, you’ll get an invite.

Read Scoble’s impression on StackOverflow

I came up with providing an Extension method InnerXml() on XElement.

public static string InnerXml(this XElement element)
{
    StringBuilder innerXml = new StringBuilder();

    foreach (XNode node in element.Nodes())
    {
        // append node's xml string to innerXml
        innerXml.Append(node.ToString());
    }
    return innerXml.ToString();
}

Someone was exactly looking for this on StackOverflow (the awesome tech QnA site that is in private beta right now)

Some of the important features included are:

1. Net Framework Client Profile - 86.5% reduction from 197 MB 26.5 MB for applications deployment
2. WPF Designer - Improvements
3. Entity Framework for DATA access to different data providers (as opposed to Linq to Sql)
4. Changes to CLR that improve application startup time by 20-45 %
5. ADO.Net data services
6. WPF enhancements with Hardware acceleration

Last but not the least, I would like to call it “VS 9“, rather than “Visual Studio 2008″, because it is short and also there is a nifty 9 in the icon, like so,