Work Item Search in Visual Studio vNext

May 24, 2011 / No Comment

Finally, there will be a search everything in Visual Studio vNext.  Here are a couple screen shots:

Notice from the second image that there is a “standard” search syntax allowing you to search specific fields within the work item.

Upgrading Your C# Programming Skills to Be a More Effective Developer – Microsoft TechEd DEV318

May 24, 2011 / No Comment

During my talk at TechEd, DEV318 – Upgrading Your C# Programming Skills to Be a More Effective Developer (video) (Slides), I did a full review of all the most significant C# changes since C# 1.0 as shown in the following MindMap:

Configuring Windows SMTP Server on Windows 2008 for Relay

October 23, 2010 / No Comment

My SMTP mail server requires that email be sent with TLS encryption and on port 587.  This makes it problematic for Team Foundation Server (TFS) to send emails directly.  To work around the problem, I installed the Windows 2008 SMTP Server service and configured it for relaying to my real SMTP mail server. 

Install SMTP Server

To begin, launch Server Manager and add the SMTP Server feature.

This includes a dialog to add some additional items.

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Parallel.For where i does not go to i++

April 25, 2010 / 1 Comment

A problem was recent posed that I hadn’t thought to do using Parallel.For in C#. How do you parallelize a for loop variable increased by something other than i++? Typically, I would simply iterate over a enumerable collection and run against the data in parallel using Parallel.For and Parallel.ForEach.

It turns out that there is no support for this in the PFX API. Parallel.For does not support incrementing other than one and it does not support reverse iteration. Also, Enumerable is a static class – which means we can’t do extension methods on Enumerable. However, we can use a custom iterator to generate the sequence for us. By using a Func<int, int> allows us to use our familiar i+= syntax for the increment function. We can quickly create a very simple iterator that will help us out.

Visual Studio Keyboard Shortcuts Wrap-up (MSDN Flash – Feb. 2, 2009)

January 23, 2009 / 1 Comment

In this edition, I am going to wrap up a few loose ends with a selection of miscellaneous keyboard shortcuts and links to a summary keyboard shortcut poster.

Debugging:

I realize that none of you would write bugs, but in case you meet someone that does or perhaps on occasion you need to debug some code in order to explain a complex algorithm, here are some invaluable debugging keyboard shortcuts.

Visual Studio Keyboard Shortcuts for Editing (MSDN Flash -Jan. 19, 2009)

January 3, 2009 / 2 Comments

Knowing all the keyboard shortcuts for editing shows off our programming prowess, just like it would it did for programmers that could use VI.   Rather than describing the well known ones like CTRL+F and CTRL+H, I am going to review some that are more unique to Visual Studio Programming:

Find