Visual Studio

Stored procedures in SQL Server database can be unit tested using Visual Studio database unit tests. It may seem as simple thing to do at first but when you start writing tests then you will find out it’s more complex task to do then expected. In this posting I will introduce database testing with Visual Studio tools.

Visual Studio database projects are good to support software development. I have successfully used database projects for years and I think it’s time to share my experiences also to global developers audience. In this posting I will introduce you how to effectively use database projects so developers are working with up-to-date schema and test data all the time.

For Windows Home Server 2011 (WHS) there are new API-s available you can use to extend WHS web and desktop interfaces. Actually there is no Windows Home Server SDK anymore – now we have common Windows Server Solutions (WSS) SDK that works also for Windows Small Business Server, Windows Storage Server and Windows MultiPoint Server. In this posting I will show you how to create development environment for Windows Home Server 2011.

You may get the following error when deploying your web application from Visual Studio to Windows Azure using WebDeploy: Remote agent could not be contacted. Make sure the remote agent service is installed and started on the target computer. An unsupported response was received. The response header 'MSDeploy.Response' was '' but 'v1' was expected. The request was aborted: The request was canceled. COM object that has been separated from its underlying RCW cannot be used.

I found very good blog post by Andy Cross’ Blog where he describes how to deploy multiple web sites in a single Windows Azure web role. I like the idea but there are some things that should be understood and done differently if you plan to use same web role for totally different web applications that you want to run on your Windows Azure instance. In this posting I will show you how to deploy independent web applications to Windows Azure instance using single web role.

During development it is possible that database schema changes and usually it changes are same sure to come as tax office and death. Later we need to reflect these changes also to live databases and it is not very easy task to do manually. In this posting I will show you how Visual Studio 2010 database tools can help you to update database schema. Visual Studio database projects Suppose you have database project in Visual Studio 2010. Screenshot on right shows you fragment of my example database with couple of tables. Of course, there are also other objects defined like…

One new feature that comes with Visual Studio 2010 SP1 Beta is support for deployment references. Deployment reference means that you can include all necessary DLL-s to deployment package so your application has all assemblies it needs to run with it in deployment package. In this posting I will show you how to use deployment dependencies.

Pex and Moles is new testing and code analysis technology that is created by Microsoft Research. Pex is powerful tool that helps you analyze your code, detect error situations and generate parameterized unit tests. In this posting I will give you quick and illustrated overview of Pex. (more…)

Those who are still using older versions of Visual Studio may find the free e-book “Moving to Microsoft Visual Studio 2010” useful when deciding if it is time to move to Visual Studio 2010 or not. The book is written by Ken Haines, Pascal Paré and Patrice Pelland who all work in Microsoft Consumer and Online Division.

Some of my readers have problem with detecting correct namespaces to include in code samples. Here is how to get references in place using Visual Studio IDE. You can let Visual Studio to solve references to types that have no namespaces for them included in code file. Move cursor to unreferenced type, right click on it with mouse, select Resolve and then select correct type