I've written a Visual Studio 2010 Package (VSPackage) that is an improved version of the "Task List". We plan to use this at the office for more or less day to day operations, it's exceptionally easy to use since its persistent storage is the code where you write the tags.
So far so good.
Does anyone have a tutorial on how to produce an MSI package to deploy a VSPackage like this ?
MSDN works well in this case, read here and focus on "Deployment By Using a Setup Project".
Related
I'm currently investigating my options to run automated tests from within Visual Studio 2008 Professional. I noticed that the MSDN page documenting the integrated funcionality is only available for VS 2008 and VS 2005. This kind of makes me suspcious. Since we are planning to upgrade to VS 2010 I'm wondering whether I will able to continue to use my configurations and knowledge with VS 2010? Does anyone here have made any experience with this?
TIA, Thomas
No need to be nervous, the terminology around the test configuration has merely changed in VS 2010. Most of what you know is the same but resides under different product branding which causes some versioning problems in the documentation.
Most notably, "test configuration" is often referred to as "test settings" under 2010.
Microsoft moved away from silo-ed "Team Test" terminology of VS 2005/2008 to a more holistic big picture known as Microsoft Application Lifetime Management, where testing is an integrated component for delivery of successful applications. Keep in mind that most of the documentation you'll find for testing refers to the Test Manager, which ship with the Ultimate and Test editions of Visual Studio. The Test Manager ties Tests to Use Cases and Requirements and is part of that big picture.
If you're not going down the ALM big picture, the focused view of just running tests hasn't changed much at all, with the exception of some new features like Test Impact which are pretty cool.
The following links may be useful to you, as it sounds like you're interested in how the tests can be used by developers or part of your build process:
Running Automated Tests within Visual Studio
Running Automated Tests from the Command-line
Hope that helps!
In relation to this stackoverflow question, how would I go about creating my own Visual Studio 2008 plug-in?
I've checked the Visual Studio Developer Centre on MSDN, but the amount of info is overwhelming. There are loads of project types, and I don't even know where to start.
Where should I start looking if I want to write something which meets the following requirements:
A plug-in that runs like a "service" in Visual Studio, and is able to poll Visual Studio for information, and handle Visual Studio events.
The info I'd like to access from VS are things like, what projects are currently open, who has them open, and other solution/project file based info.
The events I'd like to be able to handle are things like, the opening/closing/editing/creating/deleting of Solutions / Projects / individual files.
I'd also like to be able to handle any interaction with VS on a per solution basis. So, I'd like to handle any interaction with files, even code editing, but also, just other interaction, like with the menus, or just the IDE itself.
As well as these, I'd also like to be able to store data somewhere. Where is this usually done? Can I add Metadata to the Solution file? Or, does it make sense to save this info to a small local instance of a database, that is somehow attached to the solution..?
I just need a push in the right direction, is any of this possible? What part of the Visual Studio Developer Centre should I focus on? What APIs should I check out?
cheers!
An add-in can do most of that. There's a template in VS2008 for creating a base add-in.
I have an add-in that you can download that hooks into the solution/project load events etc - it is free and comes with source code ( http://www.huagati.com/projectloader/download/huagatiprojectloader.zip ). This particular add-in detects when projects/solutions are loaded and pre-loads referenced assemblies to work around a CLR bug that can cause VS2008 to crash. Anyway, the source code for it shows how to detect some of the events you're looking for.
Other than that, the definitive resource on add-in development and all the little quirks and tricks involved is Carlos Quintero's blog ( http://msmvps.com/blogs/carlosq/ ) and the "howto" article series on his website ( http://www.mztools.com/resources_vsnet_addins.aspx ).
Craig Skibo's blog ( http://blogs.msdn.com/craigskibo/ ) also has some useful tips.
You want:
Visual Studio Extensibility Developer Center
VSX Forum
Visual Studio 2008 SDK
Professional Visual Studio Extensibility by Keyvan Nayyeri
Buy the book, if nothing else.
Our company is considering using the Visual Studio Shell for one of our products.
Does anyone have any experience using it? Was it easy to work with? Did it save time? Are there any things that you weren't able to get it to do? Have you shipped anything with it?
A couple of points regarding the Isolated shell.
As you might know, there are two considerations when you use shell - Isolated Mode and Integrated Mode. (Read more from MSDN)
Isolated Shell can be used by organizations, to build applications that run side by side with other editions of Visual Studio.
Here are some points we learned,
trying to use shell for some of our
applications.
If you are planning to use Isolated
shell, you can't use Microsoft
Language Packages like C# and VB.NET
inside that.
Creating a package for your shell is
much like creating any other VS
Package.
You don't have support for Team
Explorer and VS Built in Source
Control access, in Isolated Shell
(See this post from Vin)
Though not directly related - If you are using VS SDK 1.1 to develop your packages - remember that the managed package framework is no longer available with the default distribution. So don't get surprised if your old packages can't load MPF files after moving to SDK 1.1. It has got moved to Codeplex as a separate download.
I played around a bit with it a couple of weeks ago, like every thing there is going to be a learn curve but if you study the examples a bit and have a look at a project on codeplex called Storyboard designer. I'm sure that you could pick it up, I found it very hard to find other examples on the net but I wasn't looking very hard.
I would say if you think that the shell can give you want you need I would go for it, it is a very handy interface to work with and if your targeting developers it is also a common interface for them, so it will feel natural.
I typically use Visual Studio Community on my PC for developing business intelligence solutions (databases, SSIS, SSAS, SSRS), then deploying to the server. A few weeks ago my managers requested we put Visual Studio on a server so that other developers and consultants could connect to the server and access Visual Studio.
Ultimately I installed SQL Server Data Tools (14.0.61021.0), which automatically installed Visual Studio Shell 2015. After installation, I launched Visual Studio Shell and tried doing some of the things I am used to doing in Community edition. I was able to do pretty much anything I was used to doing for BI Development.
Visual Studio Shell 2015:
Solution files with BI projects...
SSIS
Installing extensions & add-ons...
ANKHSVN for version control with SVN server
Visual Studio 2015 Color Theme Editor
Project deployment
I'm cheap and don't want to pay for ReSharper or TestDriven.NET, is there a free visual Studio addin for NUnit?
You can create a blank project (Choose console application for example) and in the property of the project you can select DEBUG tag and select "Start External Program". Put the path of Nunit. Then, in the start option, the command line arguments select the DLL that contains all your tests (mine is always in the nunit\bin...). Then select "enable unmanaged code debugging" and you will be able to start the project inside VS and even use the debugger step-by-step.
This is a free solution.
Now you can use Gallio: it's open source. www.gallio.org
By the way TestDriven can be downloaded for free if it's for personal use or Open Source project.
I had to find a way to use .Net Reflector inside VS few days ago and when I downloaded TestDriven it cames with. Never got any popup asking me to paid.
NUnit actually ships with a basic integrated runner. It's not very good, and not very publicized, but unless Charlie has taken it out, it should be in the source.
I know this is an old question but another way to do this is to add an external tool from the tools menu to run nunit - set the arguments to be $(TargetName)$(TargetExt) and initial directory to $(ProjectDir)\bin\Debug
check out this link
This is an old question and things have changed since the answer was accepted.
You may try NCrunch to run tests automatically or manually.
If you're running Visual Studio 2012, there is a plugin written by Charlie Poole, one of the NUnit contributers, that makes use of the new Visual Studio Unit testing plugins.
Download VsTestAdapater - it's also in the extension manager.
Unfortunately it doesn't have much grouping options yet, either by run/not run - so you can't group by class, solution and so on. It also doesn't show you any stacktrace if a test fails, just a simple green tick or red box and a message.
I haven't used it, but NUnitit is a free Visual Studio Add-in for NUnit.
http://nunitit.codeplex.com
From my experience, the best add-in for visual studio is resharper. TestDriven.Net is also good for unit tests. Hope that helps
Also found this one : http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/c8164c71-0836-4471-80ce-633383031099
It is able to launch your tests in debugger, however you need to recompile the code manually each time you change something - no auto run-build integration
I would like to use the task-list in Visual Studio but it really lacks almost any useful feature a task-list should provide. So I use Todo-List externally, to keep track of the things I need to get done. Would be nice to have it all in one place.
So does anyone know of a cool replacement Add-On for the tasklist in Visual Studio?
Thanks in advance!
Assumed: Visual Studio 2008 + ReSharper
ReSharper->Windows->ToDo Explorer
E-
For semi-immediate programming tasks I use TODO comments in code and ReSharper for Visual Studio to view them.
For longer-term tasks I use Team Foundation Server to record work items.
For non-programming tasks I use Google Calendar.
You can modify the task list in Visual Studio by clicking
TOOLS --> OPTIONS --> ENVIRONMENT --> TASK LIST
In the Token List you can add more tokens specific to what you want to call your tasks.
For example.. I have an EDITING token set up so in any module, class or method that I'm working on I just add the ' EDITING: (Name of whatever method ect..) comment and I can quickly see where I left off and get back too it by double clicking.
Here are a few other tokens I find useful...
If you would like more advanced project and code tracking you should check out Visual Studio Online. It's free for upto 5 users.
http://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/products/visual-studio-online-overview-vs
How about the FogBugz add-in for Visual Studio 2005 and 2008?
This requires a FogBugz account hosted either locally or by Fog Creek. A free Student and Startup version is available.
I don't know of an add-on (I use Remember The Milk externally), but I think you are onto a good idea there.
We use Team Foundation Server at work - it is a really superb product, but too expensive for smaller teams.
Out of work I'm looking to use CountersSoft Gemini (http://countersoft.com/home.aspx) which has good VS integration and is competitive when looking at the hosted version with unlimited users.