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Visual Studio

VS Code for PHP development

Although most of my work time is spent on ASP.NET and SharePoint development I also have some PHP projects. I have my own favorite thin tooling for PHP but I decided to give a try to Visual Studio Code (VS Code) with one of the projects. This blog post describes what I have in my dev box and what are my first impressions using VS Code for PHP development.

Select C# version in Visual Studio

Want to try out features of newest of some specific version of C# but Visual Studio 2017 can’t compile it? Well, by default major versions of C# are supported and if some other version is needed it must be turned on from project settings. This blog post shows how to switch between C# versions in Visual Studio 2017.

Internals of tuple literals

My last post about tuple literals gave brief intorduction to these. This post goes to internals of tuple literals, peeks behind the compiler and shows what happens with tuple literals internally. This post is for developers who are new to tuple literals and want to gain more deep understanding of these.

Who messed up Visual Studio tab indent level?

After one of latest Visual Studio 2017 I noticed that tab length is incorrect in C# editor. I went through options and confirmed that tab size for C# was set to four spaces. But still for some reason editor used two as tab size. There have been some small changes how Visual Studio 2017 prioritizes settings and here is how to solve the mess.

Progress indicator with Xamarin Forms

Process indicator is available in Xamarin Forms and here it is called as “activity indicator”. It renders different on different devices as progress indicator is not general UI feature everywhere. This blog post shows how to use process indicator with Xamarin Forms.

Visual Studio Tools for Tizen

Tizen is Linux-based open-source platform for mobile phones and TV-s. Earlier this year Samsung announced Tizen development tools for Visual Studio and now it is time to try out how things work. Although the tooling is still in preview and there is no stable version, it still possible to start playing with Tizen development. This blog post gives overview of my first experiences with Xamarin Forms and Tizen development.

Building web API apps on ASP.NET Core 2 and VB.NET

ASP.NET Core 2 will come with full support for VB.NET. In current preview we can use VB.NET to build .NET Core applications. I was still successful on mixing up C# and VB.NET project files and port C# code over to VB.NET and build proof-of-concept level web API applicaton that returns fake data about current weather in different cities.

Creating simple shoutbox using ASP.NET Core Razor Pages

ASP.NET Core 2 comes with Razor Pages that allow developers to build simple web applications with less overhead compared to MVC. The emphazise is on the word “simple” as Razor Pages doesn’t come with patterns suitable for bigger and more complex applications. For this we have MVC that is flexible enough to build applications that will grow over years. This blog post uses simple shoutbox application to illustrate how to build applications using Razor Pages.

Using Entity Framework Core in-memory database for unit testing

ASP.NET Core applications can be tested with different testing frameworks and Entity Framework Core makes testing specially easy by removing different technical problems from our way by using in-memory data provider. This blog posts shows how to unit test controllers that use data from Entity Framework Core.

ASP.NET Core: SQL Server based distributed cache

ASP.NET Core supports also distributed cache solutions. Out-of-box there is support for SQL Server and Redis based distributed caches. This blog post focuses to SQL Server based cache we can use when there are really no better options.

Throw expressions in C# 7.0

C# 7.0 introduces throw expressions. We can add exception throwing to expression-bodied members, null-coalescing expressions and conditional expressions. This blog post introduces throw expressions, demonstrates how to use them and also provides a peek behind a compiled throw expressions.

HTTP-triggered Azure Functions

Azure Functions supports functions that are invoked by HTTP request. It makes it easy to have some scripted functionalities on cloud that we can invoke by simple HTTP request. This blog post shows how to build and run HTTP-triggered Azure Functions using Visual Studio.

Solving bower and bundling errors in imported ASP.NET Core projects

For some ASP.NET Core projects errors related to bower and bundling may appear after project is moved to csproj file from previous project.json format. This blog post introduces how I got these errors solved for imported project.

Using Azure AD with ASP.NET Core

Azure Active Directory is cloud-based directory service that allows users to use their personal or corporate accounts to log-in to different applications. Local Active Directory can sync data to its cloud counterpart. Also external users are supported. This blog post shows how to make ASP.NET Core application use Azure AD and how to read data that Azure AD provides about user account.

ASP.NET MVC: Precompiling views

This blog post is about how to really precompile ASP.NET MVC views. It destroys the myth about MvcBuildViews as precompilation tool and shows you how to configure precompiling. It also stops on some internals of precompiling and explains what are the options and limitations with it. There is also real-life example for Azure where precompiling of views may avoid some serious headaches that one may face otherwise.

ASP.NET 5 and CSS bundling: Fixing image paths

With ASP.NET 5 we don’t have current bundling and minification system available. It’s replaced by new one that is based on Gulp. Default web application shows how to minify simple and safe files. But if you have some more complex design with CSS files referring to images then you are on your own. This post shows you how to solve a problem.

ASP.NET 5: How to debug with ASP.NET source?

Although ASP.NET MVC is well tested framework and probably you don’t find any major bugs in public releases you may still sometimes need to debug your application with ASP.NET MVC sources. In this posting I will show you how debugging with sources works in ASP.NET vNext.

ASP.NET 5 on Azure Websites

Something cool to try out – you can run your ASP.NET vNext applications on Windows Azure Websites already today. Yes, you can take Visual Studio 14 CTP, create ASP.NET vNext application and deploy it to cloud. In this posting we will sniff around in Azure Websites to see how ASP.NET vNext applications run there.

ASP.NET 5: New structure of solutions and projects

ASP.NET MVC 6 solutions have a little bit different solution and project structure. Changes are needed because of new minimalistic tooling and cross-platform requirements. This posting gives you overview of new solution structure and explains how solutions will be organized in future.

Using web.config transforms with App.config files

In one of my projects I needed configuration transforms similar to web applications. But I needed transforms for command line and Windows service applications to make sure that with release builds some settings are different (by example, web service URL-s and some other settings). I found some materials from web and got everything work well. Here is how to enable web.config transforms for App.config files too.

First look at Visual Studio Online “Monaco”

With Visual Studio 2013 Microsoft also announced online version of Visual Studio for Windows Azure Web Sites. When I first saw SharePoint Napa tools and “powered by Vsiual Studio” slogan then I knew that soon Visual Studio is on cloud. Now Microsoft made their next step. Let’s see what Visual Studio Online with codename “Monaco” is and what you can do with it.