Visual Studio

These real world experiences with Azure are now available in the Pluralsight course "Modernizing Your Websites with Azure Platform as a Service" It seems like every time I turn around there’s something I haven’t seen in Azure. If I’m honest, it leaves me in a perpetual state of “Oh man, there is so much stuff I don’t know”. I suspect that resonates with many readers of this blog because there’s just so much stuff to keep on top of these days. Often I’m not sure if I’ve just been overlooking something that’s always been there or if it’s...

It’s here! Visual Studio 2013 has just hit with an announcement here and downloads here plus a launch in four weeks. No, I don’t quite understand what a launch next month means when you can grab it now either but the important thing is that the new software has landed. In times gone by I’ve written my own overviews of what’s new in the VS IDE plus the frameworks and projects templates that launch with it but there’s so much good reading out there now that I’m going to take a little short cut and just link you through to the good stuff with a few brief intros....

After a short exchange of friendly but accusatory cross-continental messages, I’ve learned something new about .NET projects today. Let me start with the symptoms as that’s the first thing I Googled for and how I suspect others will find this and save themselves some pain in the future. Let’s say you have a solution like this: This is a brand newie right out of the box to demonstrate the problem. The web project references the ClassLibrary project as a project reference. In other words, the project file contains something like this: <ProjectReference Include="..\ClassLibrary\ClassLibrary.csproj"> <Project>{705479f2-2820-44ea-a983-f03c70ae0754}</Project> <Name>ClassLibrary</Name>...

Fresh from the 2012 MVP summit with lots of enthusiasm and grand ideas, I thought it would be worthwhile repeating my 25 illustrated examples of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 post with the technologies of today (or should that be tomorrow?) albeit a few weeks later than I had planned. There are some very, very exciting new things in the pipeline which I’d like to share while they’re fresh in my mind and analogous with that post from two and a half years back, I’d like to actually show you what’s happening. There’s so much great new stuff in Visual Studio 11 that it deserves its own post! If...

<< Part 2: MSBuild and deployable packages Part 4: Continuous builds with TeamCity >> In the first two parts of this series we got config transforms working and the web app successfully bundled into a nice self-contained deployable package. Next up: get the thing to publish. For the most part, the vast majority of web app deployment has historically been done by pushing the entire site out over either UNC or FTP, a practice which has a series of fundamental shortcomings that set deployment up for potential failure. To begin with, by default neither protocol is encrypted. Yes, there’s SFTP and FTPS but it’s not often you see these applied, particularly not as a...

Part 2: MSBuild and deployable packages >> If you publish a web application using CTRL-C and CTRL-V, you’re deploying it wrong. If you manually run an Xcopy command, you’re deploying it wrong. If you use an FTP client to move your files to a remote server, you’re deploying it wrong. If not everyone is following exactly the same release process, you’re deploying it wrong. If publishing involves any manual handling of Web.config, you’re deploying it wrong. This might seem a little sensationalist but after Scott Hanselman set a high “doing it wrong” bar in his excellent Web Deployment Made Awesome: If You're Using XCopy,...

So I got a little bit inspired the other day after watching Scott Hanselman’s Web Deployment Made Awesome: If You're Using XCopy, You're Doing It Wrong from MIX10. With a perfect candidate ASP.NET 3.5 web app and VS2010 RC I dived in and generated Web.Release.config and Web.Debug.config files then went to publish. Unfortunately it didn’t all go to plan and all I got was this particularly uninformative error: The "TransformXml" task failed unexpectedly. System.UriFormatException: Invalid URI: The URI is empty.    at System.Uri.CreateThis(String uri, Boolean dontEscape, UriKind uriKind)    at System.Uri..ctor(String uriString)    at Microsoft.Web.Publishing.Tasks.TransformXml.Execute(...

In my quest for both some engaging blog material and a desire to get up to speed with everything new in the latest generation VS and .NET fast, following is an overview of 25 illustrated examples of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4. It’s not seriously in depth, just enough to understand what’s new and where you can go to get the serious details. Background Rather than churning out another ubiquitous “Hello World” app, I’ve used an existing ASP.NET 3.5 project which has been my test bed for pretty much every version of .NET released so far. Hopefully this will give a bit more practical context than something hypothetical although...