Numerous times in the last month I’ve been working with different teams and when I whip out my PowerShell window and start doing all the magic, especially with Visual Studio command line tools, the young kids go crazy. The mix of command line development tools and PowerShell is a powerful aphrodisiac. Too bad that Visual Studio is living in the dark ages of batch files required to set various environment variables so everything works. The trick is getting those environment variables into …

On May 9th, I’ll be speaking at the South Sound .NET User Group in Olympia, WA on all about IntelliTrace. See location and signup info here. IntelliTrace is the first real Windows debugging technology since the hair band days of the 1980’s. This session will be PowerPoint free and nothing but demos and questions on how you can make the most of this amazing technology. It doesn’t matter if you are doing ASP.NET, WPF, Azure or even console applications, IntelliTrace will speed up your debugging. …

When sampling profiling on Windows 8 or Server 2012, nothing looks different in Visual Studio 2012, but the entire insides of the profiling collector is completely changed. With the profiler now based on Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) everything is spiffy but PDB files are more important than ever. While I’m sure you are all using the Symbol Servers and have all symbols for the code you build, what about the binaries you didn’t build and was built on the server/user’s machine? If you’re …

Turns out there’s a TrackPad Settings application! Huge thanks to Sumit Maitra for mentioning its existence on my last blog post. There was nothing in the documentation or on Microsoft’s web site that this application existed, which is a huge mistake. Instead of spending several frustrating hours and writing a blog post about that frustration, a link on the Type Cover web page saying, “we give you full control over the Type Cover with our application” so we know it exists. Come on Microsoft …

Read the follow up! There's a fix: Unicorns and Puppies Return

It sure seems that a lot of you want to toss out your laptops given how many emails and messages I got this asking how Visual Studio runs on a Surface Pro. Since I live to be at your beck and call, I’m here to give you the lowdown, skinny, and scoop. I’ve got some seriously great news but it’s tempered with some potentially seriously bad news. Since I’m a positive thinking person, let’s start with the great news.

Visual Studio …

Let’s just cut to the chase: I love it! I would have to call it the best general laptop I’ve had. With touch, the pen, and running Visual Studio in a two pound package, there’s a whole lot to like and its crapware free! Normally with a new Windows machine I have to spend two hours removing crap or reinstalling the OS so I almost didn’t know what to do after taking the Surface Pro out of the box. While I won’t replace my MacBook Pro with 16GB RAM running many virtual machines with huge SSDs, the …

Working on a giant codebase recently, I needed to check if all C# projects had Code Analysis turned on for all configurations. Given there were easily 30 to 40 different .CSPROJ files I was so not looking forward to manually going through them all one at a time in Visual Studio to check. The .CSPROJ files are just XML files and PowerShell handles XML great, so 10 minutes of messing around and I had a nice one-liner that reported all the .CSPROJ file names and which configurations didn’t have …

For some reason, I always seem to be looking for file and directory names. Since desktop search is a GUI and I'm a command line kind of guy, I got tired of waiting on PowerShell to slowly grind through the file system on its single thread. With lots of cores and an SSD, I shouldn't be waiting on simple file finds! On a plane trip I threw together this command line tool to speed up my file finding and give me an extra five seconds each day I used to spend waiting on file searches to finish. This …