In visual studio, I can do a code review for someone and add comments to their code... In their instance of visual studio they can see those comments. All good so far.
But if you go to Team Foundation Server (TFS) Online, you can't see those comments at all. And if you make code comments in the tfs online web interface, those comments are not seen in visual studio.
I thought I would be able to see all comments across both visual studio and in TFS Online but it doesn't seem to work that way.
Is there a setting I'm missing, am I misunderstanding the functionality, or is this unimplemented?
Code Reviews and Lightweight code commenting are two complementing features, but also unrelated features. Yes they both allow you to comment on code, but as you've found out, the data between these two is not shared.
There isn't much you can do right now, except for going to the Visual Studio User Voice and explain what you'd love to see (or search for an existing suggestion and add your votes there).
Related
Let a "Breakpoints" window (by default opened by Debug>Windows>Breakpoints [ctrl+B, D]) serve as an example. Basically I select few breakpoints in it and I would like to know in my add-in which elements in this window are selected. I am aware that I can get collection of breakpoints in project but I would like to know what elements are selected in "Breakpoints" window.
"Is it possible to get selected items in window or even access its content at all?"
Also I am not sure whenever or not should I post a separate question for this but is there actually a way to capture user activity in IDE like for example capturing an event when user sets (adds) a breakpoint?
Originally I also asked if is it possible to achieve certain things in Visual Studio Express Edition. But this part is irrevelant.
Conclusion:
(after reading jessehouwing's answer)
I guess it is not possible using an Add-ins. Use VSPackages isntead. Also Add-ins are deprecated as of Visual Studio 2013 version.
As mentioned in my comments, what you're trying to accomplish is explicitly prohibited in the Visual Studio Express edition and is a violation of it's license. To extend the product, you need to have at least Visual Studio Professional Edition. many of the extensibility points will actively refuse any communication with 3rd party add-ins.
Almost all the things you're asking are possible using Visual Studio Extensibility once you've installed the professional edition. Products like OzCode show that almost everything is possible. Remember that most features inside visual studio are themselves extensions of the product.
Your question, indeed a whole list of questions, is indeed not the way to ask something on StackOverflow. I can give you some pointers to the documentation, which you've probably already found, and maybe to some open source products that themselves extend parts of Visual Studio that can serve as examples, but from there you'll have to piece something together until you're able to ask more specific questions.
Events you can subscribe to, the breakpoints are a CommandEvents I suspect.
Manipulating windows inside Visual Studio
Projects that extend the debugger that might serve as an example:
PyTools (debugger for Python inside Visual Studio)
Node.js tools for Visual studio (extending the Immediate Window)
But there is no easy answer to your question that fits inside this window. I'd suggest you use a tool like Reflector to look at how Microsoft accomplishes certain things (most of Visual Studio Extensibility is written in .NET anyways) and to look at open source projects that extend visual studio behavior. There are quite a few out there on Codeplex.
I'm not entirely sure what you're trying to accomplish and how it's different from the Breakpoints features inside Visual Studio Professional and up.
I suggest you ask your question in the Visual Studio Extensibility forums over on MSDN, which is in a collaborative forum format, instead of a Q&A format, allowing people to answer your question bit by bit.
I'm currently writing a tool to help maintain unit and integration tests (coded tests). I've started extending Visual Studio to make the developer experience nicer, which got me to notice the new-ish CodeLens feature.
The stuff I'm currently showing as a tooltip should probably actually be part of the CodeLens info.
Question: Does anyone know how to extend CodeLens in Visual Studio?
Thanks.
As #RichardBanks says, officially CodeLens is not extensible. Technically I think it may be possible at the moment. Look for *CodeSense*.dll in the visual studio directory for hints. There is no documentation at present and the API can still change going forward.
I suggest you'd venture into this for research purpose only, distributing any 'plugin' seems like a very bad idea until Microsoft opens up the API, which they probably will.
CodeLens is officially extensible since Visual Studio 2019 was released.
CodeLens for Everyone
CodeLens has been a feature found only in Visual Studio Enterprise, but that will change in an upcoming preview of Visual Studio 2019, when it will also be available for the Community edition, likely in 2019. CodeLens shows the number of references a type or method has, information about unit tests covering the method, and data directly from Application Insights.
In addition, Microsoft has made CodeLens fully extensible1, so third-party extensions can start to add their own experiences on top of it. CodeLens makes key information about your types easy to find, while keeping you in the source code. Lenses for source control history and IntelliTrace are still an Enterprise-only feature.
Looks like this is the best place to start looking at when implementing your own CodeLens extension.
1. Highlight mine.
Code Lens is not currently extensible.
I can't say for sure, but I think there are still some features the team wants to add before they open it up for extension (e.g. git support).
We are going to applying VSTS 2010 in our company. This includes Visual Studio, TFS, TFS Build and ALM. It's predictable that we would encounter a wave of new questions about their usage.
But the problem is I don't know which places we could do questioning. StackOverflow is programming base question site and ServerFault is not very active. How do you think about? Which places and their advantages and disadvantages?
afsharm
You could ask your questions here, there is already a handful of question on tfs, visual-studio and msbuild.
You could also ask on Team System forum MSDN. (Or both)
We are trying to start a Visual Studio ALM community on Stack Exchange that is dedicated to these questions.
If you want to join in you can Commit to the Visual Studio ALM proposal.
Whilst you wait for the ALM site to get to beta these sites/blogs might help you:
The WoodwardWeb this is a very useful site for me.
Brian Harrys TFS blog
I am working on a C# windows based project in visual studio 2005.I often debug different features in this huge project.Now the problem is i have made few break points in few places which i require only when i debug for that feature.i want other break points to be disabled then.I understand this might not be a use case for larger community.
What i want to know is,is there any way to group break points in VS 2005 ,so that i can enable disable them when i debug that particular feature?
There's not a feature built into Visual Studio, however something I came across a while back is a clever use of macros to give some grouping functionality.
Check out this blog entry by Jim Gries showing how to do it.
Just a note, I now it doesn't help your current situation, but the situation has been improved in VS 2010.
you can check this reference:
a VS 2010 Debugger Improvements (BreakPoints, DataTips, Import/Export)
This solution works only in Visual Studio 2010 and above
I recently got a job working for a company who uses several programming languages but mainly focuses on C#, and thus uses Visual Studio 2008.
As lame as it sounds, I don't know how to use it productively. I don't know any of the keyboard shortcuts, I didn't know you could restrict builds to certain parts of a solution until someone showed me. I'm sure there's a way to "Clean" "Build" "Run" without manually initiating each process, but I don't know what it is.
If it was just a "Search the help" problem, that'd be easy to solve, but I don't even know what I might be missing. Is there a productivity feature that everyone else uses and I don't? {Shrug}
So, what simple features of Visual Studio am I likely to be missing, and how can I find out other power-features to help me become more productive?
You can learn tons from walkthroughs, like the File/New/NerdDinner talk that Scott Hanselman gave at Mix 2009. The talk is online here:
http://videos.visitmix.com/MIX09/T49F
Until I saw that talk I didn't realize that you could just drag a SQL Server data file into the Visual Studio APP_DATA folder, and it would automatically hook it up for you. A copy of the data file also goes along for the ride when you build your application.
There are several books that just talk about Visual Studio and how to use it productively. Here are some:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/dd285474.aspx
The problem with providing tips in an online forum like this one is that it can be difficult to "connect the dots." The walkthroughs are really good because you can see where things are in Visual Studio, and what sequences of steps are required to perform common actions.
Sara Ford wrote the book on VS tips and tricks:
http://www.amazon.com/Microsoft%C2%AE-Visual-Studio%C2%AE-Tips-PRO-Developer/dp/0735626405/
Here is a blog post with 24 of Sara Ford's tips
http://blogs.msdn.com/saraford/archive/2009/05/28/devdays-09-24-visual-studio-tips.aspx/
I also recommend James Avery's book:
http://www.amazon.com/Visual-Studio-Hacks-Tools-Turbocharging/dp/0596008473
I hope this helps.
As a start here is a poster which shows all the keyboard shortcuts for commonly used features of VS2008 (in C# mode).
In terms of tooling, ReSharper has a number of good features for improving productivity within VS2008.