Posts Tagged ‘Visual Studio’
3 Useful Visual Studio Tricks for Spark Templates
This issue on the Spark discussion board inspired several tweaks to my Visual Studio setup. Gordon and I have found these quite useful, so we’d thought we’d share them here.
Spark template file icons
First, I made a couple registry files to give Spark templates a spiffy icon.
Visual Studio gets its icons from the same registry setting used in Windows Explorer. So all we need to do is register the file extension and associate it with a default icon.
I found a free-for-noncommercial-use “S”-shaped lightning bolt icon and used the instructions in this StackOverflow question to create the necessary registry entries.
Add an icon for Spark templates in Visual Studio 2008
You can download the SparkFile.zip package I created from Codeplex. Place the .ico file in C:\Program Files\Spark, and run the two .reg files, and you’ll have a nifty spark icon inside Visual Studio.
(All the usual caveats apply regarding modifying your registry.)
Visual Studio template
Next, I created an item template to use in the Visual Studio Add New Item menu, using this guide to creating item templates.
You can download my SparkVSTemplate.zip package from Codeplex as well. Place the SparkVSTemplate.zip file in My Documents\Visual Studio 2008\Templates\ItemTemplates\Visual C#\Web and you’ll be able to create a basic template from the VS menu. You don’t need to unzip it.
HTML syntax highlighting
Finally, I wanted to apply the standard syntax highlighting used for HTML pages.
In Visual Studio 2008, go to Tools | Options, then choose Text Editor, then associate files ending in .spark with the HTML editor.
Set up Spark View Engine templates to use the HTML Editor in Visual Studio 2008
This will set all the colors properly. Unfortunately, it will also flag any Spark-specific attributes or elements as HTML validation errors. I figure this is a small price to pay for proper syntax highlighting.
What’s missing?
I’d really like to get intellisense working Spark. Though I tried the Visual Studio Integration Package, it won’t work right outside of VS Web projects. Syntax highlighting seems like the best I can do for the moment.
If you’ve got other tips and tricks for using Spark inside Visual Studio, I’d love to hear them.
Visual Studio 2008 and the CopyLocal setting
Though the Microsoft marketing drums have begun beating to the rhythm of Visual Studio 2010, most of us workaday code monkeys are still using Visual Studio 2008. And while VS 2008 is a great IDE for development — especially once you add ReSharper — it has a few configuration quirks that drive me up the wall.
Most of these quirks are hidden from the typical developer and only appear once you try to package and deploy your software. It’s the dreaded Works on My Machine syndrome.
And if there’s one Visual Studio build configuration setting that causes me to scream in anguish, it’s the CopyLocal property.
Feel my pain
When you add a reference to another .dll in Visual Studio 2008, some default settings get applied.
The CopyLocal setting on the reference properties panel.
Here’s how the settings look after I added log4net to one of my projects. As you can see, the CopyLocal setting is set to True. Or is it?
If you move your solution to your build server, you might be surprised to find that CopyLocal isn’t actually copying the .dll. I was certainly surprised to find that my builds failing for inexplicable reasons.
It took me a while to figure out that Visual Studio 2008 is a dirty liar when it comes to CopyLocal. Let’s have a look at our .csproj file, shall we? You can load the XML in the .csproj file by following these directions.
Ah, there’s the contents of our csproj file. And there’s our reference to log4net, but…
Where's the CopyLocal setting?
The CopyLocal setting isn’t there! Within the log4net reference, we should see an XML element called Private. It should look like this:
-
<Private>True</Private>
But it’s clearly not there. Uh oh.
And because it’s not there, it might work on your machine but not on other machines. Even though the Visual Studio IDE represents CopyLocal as a Boolean value, it’s actually a ternary value. Where Booleans have two states, usually represented as True/False, Yes/No, or 1/0 pairs, ternary logic has three states:
- True
- False
- Um… uh… Other?
Yikes! That’s a classic interface failure mode.
It turns out that the default for the CopyLocal setting is… something not quite True and not quite False. If you read the documentation for how to set the CopyLocal property, it mentions the weird logic Visual Studio uses to determine what the “default” should be. Argh.
Manual repairs
To fix the problem, we reload our project in Visual Studio again. Then we toggle the CopyLocal setting from “not quite True, exactly” to “False” and then back to “totally, literally True”.
With apologies to the Violent Femmes, when I say CopyLocal, you best CopyLocal, motherf***er!!!
And now it’s really, truly TRUE. Honest. Take a look at our .csproj file now.
This is how CopyLocal=True ought to look.
And there it is, the CopyLocal setting. The way it should be. The way it should have been all along.
Conclusion
I don’t know whether Visual Studio 2010 fixes this problem. I haven’t looked at the VS 2010 Beta release to find out. I’m too busy manually editing all my .csproj files to get our Infovark builds working. But I really, really, really hope that the folks at Microsoft have done something to address the problem.
Here’s the simple interface design rule: If it isn’t a Boolean setting, it shouldn’t look like a Boolean setting.
Unless of course, you want to make the pages of The Daily WTF.
Visual Studio 2008 and its CopyLocal setting
Our build server wasn’t producing the same results as our local development machines. The same C# code yielded two different sets of code libraries. After much head-banging and hand-wringing, we finally traced the problem to an obscure error in the way Visual Studio 2008 handles .csproj files.
Basically, the Visual Studio IDE doesn’t handle the CopyLocal setting properly. This post from paraesthesia set us on the right track.
I have no idea what caused the problem. We had the same versions of the .NET Framework and Visual Studio 2008 installed on all our machines. The code was exactly the same. Apart from the build machine being Windows Server 2003 and out development machines being Windows XP, I can’t think of any other differences. But somehow the code libraries weren’t getting copied in the same way.
Just another adventure on our way toward the Beta release…
How to avoid Visual Studio Help
For what seems like the thirteen-thousandth time, I just accidentally pushed the F1 key while I was writing some code. It’s pretty close to the escape key. I didn’t mean to push it. I guess I just have fat fingers.
I really, really hate pressing F1 in Visual Studio. Usually, it takes about a minute to display Microsoft’s help documentation thingy, which is impossible to navigate, frequently wrong and and generally not very helpful. This afternoon, the document explorer decided it had to go and update itself, which took about five minutes before it could take it’s usual minute to load the non-relevant, non-help, that I didn’t even want in the first place!
During this time, Visual Studio was COMPLETELY Unusable. The help dialog blocks the main visual studio thread – and all attempts to get back to work were greeted with a friendly, informative “This may take several minutes” dialog.
Time Passes…
Time Passes…
Time Passes…
Arggh! Gord Mad!… And it turns out it’s not just me. This annoys other folks, too!
Right. That’s it Visual Studio. You’ve made me go through this song and dance for THE LAST TIME!
For starters, where do we all go for help? To Google, that’s where. So, I added an external tool using the Tools>External Tools Method:
Adding an External Tool
I set up my command to point to Firefox, and passed as the arguments:
http://www.google.com/search?site=&hl=en&q=$(CurText)+c%23&
(The +c%23& part of the command appends “C#” to whatever is highlighted in the IDE. If you’re not using C#, you could leave it out, or substitute it with whatever else you usually search for)
Then, I flipped over to the Keyboard bindings screen (Tools > Options > Keyboard:)
VS 2008 Keyboard Binding Screen
And I re-mapped the F1 key to my new ExternalCommand1.
There! Now, whenever I press F1, Visual Studio opens a new tab on my web browser, and searches Google for whatever I have highlighted in the IDE.
Purposefully punishing developers with a minute or two wait everytime they press a certain key is just plain unforgivable. They get really distracted trying to work around the “functionality”, and then further distracted writing ranty blog posts about it…
