Visual Studio
Editing your code
So for the past few months I’ve been working on internal projects (hence no blogging – there’s nothing to share). For one of the projects, a complete rewrite of an internal site currently in ASP (woohoo, VBScript!) to MVC. Admittedly it’s only MVC 2.0 for various reasons and boy, do I regret that choice after seeing the new 3.0 tools at MIX. Obviously MVC gives me (and my minions) the opportunity to test properly and part of that is code coverage. However I had real problems getting it to work, every time I turned code coverage on the MVC...
A couple of weeks ago I saw Jon Skeet (all hail the Skeet) present on code contracts in Visual Studio. Code Contracts grew out of Spec#, which took inspiration from Eiffel and are a useful way of baking in constraints and requirements for method arguments. Code contracts are available from Microsoft Research for VS2008 and is being baked into .NET 4.0 and VS2010. It’s useful stuff for ensuring code quality (MS used the Spec# bits in the System.Cryptography namespace in .NET 3.0) – however there’s a problem. When MS took the leap to providing a unit test system they...
Today saw Microsoft release an out of band update for Visual Studio correcting a vulnerability in the Active Template Library. Any control which has been compiled with previous versions of ATL may allow remote code execution and must be recompiled and a corrected version distributed as soon as possible. This vulnerability affects Visual Studio 2003, 2005 and 2008. Microsoft have a dedicated page to the problem on the Microsoft Security site. The Security Research and Defense blog also has an overview of the release along with a great list of further resources: MS09-034: Internet Explorer bulletin ...
Recent updates to Silverlight meant I had to install the latest Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio. This has had an annoying side affect – when you press F1 in Visual Studio on a keyword that exists in both Silverlight and the .NET framework and you are using local help the Silverlight topic is displayed. If your primary development target is not Silverlight this is a royal PITA and is acknowledged on the Silverlight SDK blog.. In order to fix this right click on the VS2008 icon and run as an administrator. Choose the Index option from the Help menu....