I thoroughly enjoy the amazing power of LINQPAD (thanks, Joseph Albahari!) and particularly LINQPad's Dump method. Frequently I take an existing Visual Studio project and move it into LINQPad for the sole purpose of adding a couple Dump statements to see what the data looks like--though Visual Studio's data popups are certainly useful, the Dump output is just much easier to digest. To do this, I open each file I need from the current project, copy and paste the individual classes over to LINQPad, add assemblies and using statements, attempt to run so that LINQPad will tell me what I missed, and repeat until I find all the orphan references.
This method seems antithetical to the elegant, streamlined nature of LINQPad. Is there an easier way? Any chance of seeing "Import Project" on LINQPad's File menu any time soon? If not, I may end up writing a utility myself...
If you just want to call .Dump() in VS, check out this:
http://code.google.com/p/linqpadvisualizer/
Importing an entire VS project into LINQPad might be impractical... but I'm going to look in to whether just references can easily be copied over from a .csproj.
LINQPad is awesome and I also manually import projects occasionally. I haven't heard Mr. Albahari mention anything about "Import Project" functionality. And I'd be surprised if he would be interested in implementing something like this anytime soon.
Of course, he is very receptive to suggestions so I recommend posting your idea in his Nutshell forum which he frequents.
Additionally, check out the TypeSerializer in Service Stack libraries. I believe its Dump extension method is wrapped by LINQPad's which then encodes the output in XHTML. It might just be easier for you to use it directly in your code.
Related
When programming a big project, you often need the same pieces of code in different pages. calling methods, returning references, ...
Now, I always need to open a page, and copy paste parts from that. but I'm getting tired of that. There should be a better way to list very often used code. I've read about snippets but they seem a lot of work. How do you manage that?
Snippets are not a lot of work if you use one of the handy snippet-easing extensions to Visual Studio. I happen to like this one http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/B08B0375-139E-41D7-AF9B-FAEE50F68392 by Matt Manela. Once it's installed, you can right-click a block of code and make it into a snippet. You can also set up replacements just like when you do an if or for block with the built-in snippets.
So we have this tool, it's a web page, we drop a large piece of text in textBox a (say sql) run the tool
and it generates the guts of a code file in TextBoxb (say a custom view class model).
it's written in C#.
I know there are several ways to create visual studio extensions.
What I'd like to know is, what's the best/easiest/fastest way to take a c# dll that has a method that takes text in and returns text out, and turn it into a VisualStudio extenson, that takes text in and creates a files, adds it to the project and puts the text into it.
We're using Vs2008 and VS2010, and I'm okay the best soloution only work on 2010.
The closest I've found by googling so far is this:
http://visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/2009/03/01/generate-code-from-custom-file-formats.aspx
but they are for custom file formats only, i want to generate*.cs and *.rdlc and similar files.
I'd also like to be able to add methods to an existing class.
tutorial walkthroughs or better approaches woud be greatly appreicated.
VS package Builder is the answer. Lots easier.
I'm working on a project which makes substantial use of code generation. Some of the files it generates contain >0.25 million lines of code. VS (2K5) doesn't cope too badly, but R# (4.01) throws an out of memory exception every two minutes or so.
Splitting them out into partial classes/separate files isn't an option in the immediate term, though it may be later.
Are there any clever IDE tricks to dealing with this?
EDIT: so people are immediately saying (very sensibly) 'don't have a file that big' and suggesting ways to break it out into smaller files.
That's fine, but I'm on a time-boxed task taking a look around and deciding what to optimise. My problem is very specifically 'how to view an insanely big file in an IDE without pain', not 'how to refactor the project'. For purposes of the question please imagine the file is read-only. :)
I would at least change huge files extention to something like .cpp_gen or .cpp_huge to remove syntax highlighting, outlining etc. and then reassign build tool back to C/C++ compiler tool for them.
Seems like this R# tool (is that Resharper?) is the problem. Can you disable it?
Otherwise, changing the file type for the generated code might make sense - presumably, you aren't going to be doing major editing on those files, so losing syntax coloring and other features specific to source files wouldn't be an issue.
WOW!
250 000 lines of code?
you should think not in a machine point of view, but in a human been point of view. Let's say that you want to pass that code to someone else, can you see the time to see what the code does?
Design Patterns were made to deal with this ind stuff, try to start small, refactoring it, then go deeper and start applying more D.P.
you will have less and less lines of code, and Yes, one of the best tricks is to separate into several files according to it's propose.
Assuming you're not hand-editing your generated code. (=BAD IDEA!!)
You could put the generated files in a separate solution that you compile from the command line and then reference those dll's from the project you're working in.
Is the problem when you open the file for editing in Visual Studio? I've noticed that VS editor can be quite slow and inefficient on large files. Also, you could try turning off certain options, e.g. word-wrapping kills my machine for some reason.
Otherwise you could use something else like Textpad with syntax highlighting installed to edit the problematic large source file... not as nice, for sure.
Don't use visual studio. There is too much going on in VS.
Since the file is read only, you wont be using any IDE features (Intellisense, Refactoring tools, formatting).
You will probably get better performance using a simpler application, such as notepad++ for simply viewing the file. Notepad++ will do standard language highlighting if you like color.
Can't you break up the files and use the preprocessor to bring them back together when you compile?
It must be possible somehow to group large chunks of those files in separate libraries. You'd then separate them into several projects. Tried this? What the is the current structure of your source code/ project?
I have recently noticed how interesting Visual Studio's macros are. I did not use VB for ages so it took me a while until i finally managed to write a little macro that performs some stuff on the currently open document.
Enthusiastically, I next wanted to use this macro on every source code file (.cs) in the solution without having to manually open all files. Could you give me a quick hint on how to do this?
Check out the DTE object reference. Inside a macro you can reference some really neat global properties, like DTE.Solution, which returns a Solution object that describes the currently open solution (and, not surprisingly, has a Projects property, which is a collection of all Projects in the solution). You should be able to iterate over pretty much anything you want at that point!
Have fun :)
I'd like to create a script that will configure the Visual Studio IDE the way I like it. Nothing vastly complicated, just a few Tools/Options settings, adding some External Tools, that kind of thing.
I know that this can be done inside VS with Import/Export Settings, but I'd like to be able to automate it from outside of VS. Is this possible, and if so, how?
Edited to add: doing it from outside of VS is important to me -- I'm hoping to use this as part of a more general "configure this newly-Ghosted PC just the way I like it" script.
Edited again: the solution seems to be to hack CurrentSettings.vssettings, or use AutoIt. Details below.
Answering my own question, in two ways:
In VS2005/8, the things I mentioned (Tools/Options, External Tools) are all stored in the CurrentSettings.vssettings file, in the folder "Visual Studio 200{5|8}\Settings". This file is just XML, and it can be edited programmatically by anything that knows how to parse XML. You can also just paste a new vssettings file over the top of the default one (at least, this works for me).
The larger question of configuring a virgin PC. It turns out that not everything I want to change has an API, so I need some way of pretending to be a user who is actually sitting there clicking on things. The best approach to this seems to be AutoIt, whose scripting language I will now have to learn in my Copious Free Time.
An easy way is to use the macro recorder to do something simple, then look at the code it produces and edit it as you see fit.
On my machine Visual Studio stores it's local settings in a file called VCComponents.dat. Its a text file, so perhaps you could find a way of placing your settings directly in there.
The file is stored in my users local AppData\Local\Microsoft\VC folder