Visual Studio

Sharing code and working together on it in real time from different locations has been issue for years. We have video chat and screen sharing for long time but working on same files together in IDE has been a dream. Visual Studio Live Share is here to solve the problem. Although the service is not generally available yet it is possible to try out early versions of it using Visual Studio or Visual Studio Code.This blog post gives straightforward overview of Visual Studio Live Share specially for developers.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.