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Closed 12 years ago.
What is the Best/Worst features of Visual Studio 2010 you like/dislike most, comparing to VS 2008?
Worst feature? Only one built-in color theme which does not allow for customization. Not everyone is crazy about blue, you know.
I'd say that without question, the best feature is the whole add-in support and ecosystem (with built-in browser).
It's the first time that Visual Studio can actually compete with Eclipse - at least in my opinion :)
Worst thing: the removal of .dbp Database projects. Almost as bad as when they removed ETP projects in Visual Studio 2005.
I hate it when they remove things that were working perfectly well. In this case the replacement has a learning curve, appears to be SQL Server only, and doesn't have some of the convenient features of dbp projects such as right-click / Run On.
ETP projects in .NET 1.x were great as containers to contain groups of projects and/or files such as documentation or third party dlls, which could then be all added to a solution in one step.
well, I'll answer with what is a regression to me, unless I've missed it in which case please point me to the solution.
When using VS2008 with TFS, to add an existing project from the source explorer to a solution, you could simply double click the project file, that was nice. Now if you double click a project file, it opens a new solution with just that projet. That means if you want to create a new solution and add multiple existing project, you'd have to go through those steps :
Right click solution
Add existing project
Browse
Navigate to the project file
Select it
Click OK
Repeat
Worst feature: It's not vim
Related
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Closed 10 years ago.
What are in your opinion the "must have" Visual Studio 2010 extensions?
OData Protocol Visualizer is fine
Solid Softfare Xplorer isn't free, but looks very nice
Just tried NuGet Tools and it's GREAT
Resharper 5.0 is the one I must have. Some others are nice to have as well.
I like the Visual Studio 2010 Pro Power Tools.
Mine are
PowerCommands for Visual Studio 2010 offer so much...
Triple Click - Select line with Triple Click
StructureAdornment - Show scope of code
Go To Definition And Them Editor - As mentioned by Noah
Matt's Visual Studio Color Theme Editor is proving to be really popular (over 10,000 downloads as of 4/18/10).
I've written a couple that are popular; Go To Definition is one of the most popular. If you do a search for my name ("Noah Richards"), you'll find some of the others (triple click to select whole lines, italicize comments, spell checking for strings and comments, and about 7 others).
There's at least one other spell check extension on the gallery, the HTML Spell Checker. It's more mature than the one I wrote but requires Office to work.
I love the Win7 Taskbar Extension, especiall when working with multiple solutions.
http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/0c92dd87-50ac-489e-882b-b99de7624502
I have found the snippets to be useful for various tasks along the way, and so this is a good way to smooth out the maintenance of such snippets:
Snippet Designer
Description Adapted from the website:
A Snippet editor integrated inside of the IDE.
Opening any .snippet file
Uses the native Visual Studio code editor
Mark replacements with a convenient right click menu.
Snippet properties inside the Visual Studio properties window.
A Snippet Explorer tool
A right Click "Export as Snippet" menu option added to C#, VB and XML code editor to send highlighted code directly to the Snippet Editor
When using SVN
Visual SVN
saves a lot of time and it is very handy.
Can I put a plug in for my own extension? :)
PowerGUI Visual Studio Extension - Add PowerShell support to VS2010
I use these extensions:
Productivity Power Tools
Autoscroller
The first one has a lot of options, just enable the options you like. I liked the 'close selected tab' icon on the right corner in Visual studio 2008. You can enable that icon again with this extension. I also like the option to 'pin' tabs.
The autoscroller enables the scrolling in the main window, its also called 'middle-click scrolling'. I missed taht from VS 2008 as well.
Microsoft Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010 is a must have for WPF developers.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=eff8a0da-0a4d-48e8-8366-6ddf2ecad801&displaylang=en
Refactor is a must-have for me. CodeRush is also nice, though one of these years I need to seriously compare it to Resharper. I think most people stick with whichever they first use, as they both take a lot of time to learn.
http://www.devexpress.com/Downloads/Visual_Studio_Add-in/
Update
As pointed out below by Jonathan Allen, this functionality already exists in Visual Studio 2010 Pro Power Tools. Adding this extension, then, would be redundant if you already have that.
There are many ways to solve the posting of formatted code, but I liked the integrated nature of this extension and how you can tweak the resulting HTML:
Code4Blog
Description From Linked Page:
Code4Blog is a Visual Studio 2010 extension that allows to convert any code supported by Visual Studio IDE to HTML format with the same structure and colors. Main purpose of this extension is to prepare a code snippet to be published in rich documents, for example in blog posts, Microsoft Word documents or Help files. Some additional styling could be applied: max width and height of the code block, custom background (per code line), font family and font size, line numbering and others.
I'm using Visual Nunit which is rather nice if you don't have the money to stump up for something like ReSharper. It's only feature (as far as I'm aware) is to allow running nunit tests from within the IDE, which is nice becuase it means you don't have to revert to Nunit GUI every time you want to run some of your unit tests. Also seems pretty stable as of version 1.1.7.
I find the following useful
If you use TFS for ALM Management
Search Work Items for TFS 2010
VS10x Code Map is great for visually navigating classes
SpecFlow for mapping User Stories/Features to automated tests in a way that is readable by steak holders or team members without coding knowledge (Behaviour Driven Development)
And a Spell Checker for strings/comments is always good
I'm also going to plug my own extension - VSFileNav used for quickly finding a file in your solution using wildcards, camel case searches etc.
I developed it because there wasn't anything free (and good - SonicFileFinder was too slow) and used it many times every day.
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Closed 9 years ago.
I am using c# express and would like to use a free version control system. Please share your recommendations.
Visual Studio Express is crippled in the sense that it cant load any plugins or addons.
Just go with TortoiseSVN. Works easy enough.
It seems to me you are new to Version Control. If you haven't used source control before, I recommend looking at a distributed version control system (DVCS) directly. My choice was Mercurial, because it has excellent documentation, a clean and consistent interface, works well on all major platforms (using it on Windows, Linux and MacOSX) and a great support for PlugIns (several are officially redistributed, such as mq) that let you do very advanced stuff. There are great GUIs available (TortoiseHG, but also standalone). There is a nice introduction to Mercurial here, but the it's also useful for the general conept.
Popular DVCS include: Mercurial, Git and Bazaar but in the end it doesn't matter which tool you choose There is lots of information here on SO about comparisons.
The best IDE PlugIn is don't use one. I think IDE integration is not necessary when working with a DVCS. When working in a centralized system, it is reasonable for the purpose of automatic check out on edit, rename support etc.. However, I like keeping things seperate. I don't want my IDE cluttered up. I don't see any benefits in using a plugin compared to a standalone solution (that I keep running on a second monitor). To support renaming, a good DVCS has built in heuristics to find and track renames automatically.
I am fine with TortoiseHG and the command line for more complicated tasks.
Don't use your IDE for version control. Get to know your version control system itself. Which one you should use depends on your requirements. My personal favourite at the moment is Mercurial.
Subversion along with AnkhSVN plugin for VStudio and TortoiseSVN plugin for the windows explorer.
It tracks folders as well as files and keeps history on renames. Those are really useful for refactoring your code.
Edit: forget about AnkhSVn in VisualStudio Express because it can't load plugins.
Personally, I hate the tortoise type clients, mainly because Explorer frustrates the hell out of me and isn't a good file-system browser at all..
I choose an unorthodox approach and install NetBeans and use the "favorites" tab to add locations for versioned file systems I wish to manage.
I use this approach for Visual Stuido.
My prior tool was WinCVS.
Since 2012 you can use TFS (Team Foundation Studio) 2012 Express with Visual Studio 2012 Express editions for free.
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Closed 10 years ago.
I've seen ReSharper recommended a lot Unfortunately, it doesn't support C++ in Visual Studio. Is there anything out there you can recommend? I already use Visual Assist, and it does its job very well, but it's quite limited in comparison with ReSharper.
Any suggestions?
IMHO - Visual Assist X is best but expensive code completion/refactoring tool for C++.
VAX has not so much features as ReSharper for C#, but it makes your C++ programming easier and faster... Just looked on CodeRush - it su%% as most of DevExpress libs & tools.
Refactor Pro is available for Visual C++, this will give you some functionality. Also check out CodeRush, I think it also supports C++.
I tried both Refactor Pro and Visual Assist/X. Neither of them thrilled me in the same way that ReSharper does. I guess that mostly, this is because C++ is such a hard language to write automatic refactorings for.
The solution is to code in Eclipse or NetBeans, but such IDEs are not Visual Studio.
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Closed 10 years ago.
I currently use AnkhSVN to integrate subversion into Visual Studio. Is there any reason I should switch to VisualSVN?
AnkhSVN is free (in more than one sense of the word) while VisualSVN costs $50. So right there unless I'm missing some great feature of VisualSVN I don't see any reason to switch.
I used VisualSVN until Ankh hit 2.0, and ever since, I've abandoned VisualSVN. Ankh has surpassed VisualSVN in functionality, in my mind, and all the 1.x perf and integration issues are gone.
I recently tried Ankh but quickly switched back to VisualSVN. Because:
Better commit dialog (use UI of tortoise)
No refresh problems (which i had using ankh)
Imho visual svn is easilty worth its money
For me, VisualSVN is pretty, but useless. AnkhSvn on the other hand, after it came in v2 as an scc provider, it works very good.
VisualSVN tries to think for you, which is not an good thing, the user should be the controller, not the software.
The main thing is that VisualSVN uses TortoiseSVN for nearly all of its UI. So you only really have to set up one client (preferred diff viewer, etc), and you can take advantage of things like the same "Previous messages" button on the Commit dialog, whether you're committing from Explorer or Visual Studio.
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Closed 10 years ago.
I support a third party system that uses COM, classic ASP, and SQL Server. Our company has gone to using TFS as our source control provider - which pushes things through Visual Studio. So, what's the best way to get a classic asp front-end into Visual Studio?
When I had to do this, I created a blank solution in VS and then added the folders from the ASP site one at a time, adding "existing items" to each folder as I created it.
In this way I'm able to open the solution which keeps track of what files I had open at last open, plus I get the benefits of intellisense
I have done this frequently over the last 5 years...
You could create an Empty Website, or even create a standard (.NET) website and simply delete the default stuff it generates (web.config etc). Note: create a website, creates a solution and adds a website project within it, which is arguably slightly more preferable than simply adding files and folders to solution.
As Geoff says, you get most of the benefits of VS including intellisense.
Suck it and see... Have a fiddle - you are not going to break anything!
Did any of you heard of Visual Web developer 2008 Express edition?
Work wonders for me.
Most important as soon as you ask to open website in it- it opens each folder of intended website and when you save project it does what you need to do to later open this website in regular visual studio.
It have some limited capability even to convert simple Classic ASP pages into NET code!
Create a blank solution in VS and add all the files by choosing "Add Existing Item.."