for .NET Developers, Architects & Consultants
Daily .NET Tips is aiming to sharing useful coding tips and tricks for .NET Developers. This site completely design for sharing Tips and Tricks, useful Code Snippet which anyone use in daily development work and targeted anything related with .NET. In this post I am quickly listing down all the tips which are posted over the month April 2011.
One of the common tasks involved in the development is GUID’s generation. This is even more frequent when we are working on a SharePoint solutions. Even during writing unit test we need to 
generate static GUID to validate data’s. Visual Studio comes with a tool called guidgen.exe ( c:\program files (x86)\microsoft sdks\windows\v7.0a\bin\NETFX 4.0 Tools\guidgen.exe ) which is registered with visual studio as an external tool and invoked from Tools > Create GUID. But whenever you need an unique static GUID you have to navigate to tool and copy the ID evertime. Last few days of my development involved with lots of GUID generation where I found it’s taking time to generate so many guid’s. So, I came up with an small approach where we can generate a GUID by just pressing some shortcut key. Behind the seen I wrote a macro for the same and that is being triggered with the key press.
In this blog post, I am going to share a quite interesting tips, where you can customize the “Exception Assistant” in visual studio. I have explained how we can use this features for an custom exception class, where we want to provides custom or additional help information . As an example, I have shown how we can set some favorite blogs urls in troubleshooting tips section.
Few months back I have published an article on 10 Tips you should know about “Watch Window” While debugging in Visual Studio , where I have explained about 10 useful tips on watch window. Here I am sharing you the quick video webcast on that.
In this blog post I am going to share how you can add a document header 
of xml comments with code file automatically. This is going to be an very interesting and helpful for all of you who are using styleCop to maintain coding standard. Actually extensive using of StyleCop helped me to think to make it automate. There are many tools available which can helps us in this case to do this automatically. But I always prefer let’s Visual studio do the job for me. Here I am going to share with you two different approaches to deal with this issue. Now it’s up to you which one to use.
Visual Studio having great features to set breakpoint in multiple functions at same time. For most of the time, to set a breakpoint with in a function you just put a breakpoint in the first line of the function. Now, assume you have 10 different overloaded methods or you have same function in different project, and you want to put breakpoint all of them or few of them, then it will take time to put breakpoint in each and every function. In this post I am going to share two quick tips by which you can set breakpoint to function very easily. first one is by using “Break at Function” and second one by “Using Find Combo Box”.
“Open Containing Folder” is one of the frequent used functionality to open a particular file location in windows explore from Visual Studio IDE . How did we do that ? Yes it’s very simple, Just right click on file from files Tab and select “Open Containing Folder” from the context menu as shown in below.
This will open the selected item location in windows explorer. This operation by default having no keyboard shortcut. But do you know we can assign keyboard shortcut for the same or even we can customize the context menu in code editor to achieve the same as shown in below images.
Most of the time we use Visual Studio find combo box (
) only for search contents with in the solution. But the find combo box is something more than what we know. We can use the find combo box in different purpose like create file, open files, create project, print, open watch windows etc. As for example you can close all the open files by just typing “>CloseAll” with in find combo box followed by a “Enter”. Fundamentally we can execute all the commands from Find Combo box which are available from Visual Studio Command Window. Like Command Window, In Combo Box, if you type “>” and aliases and press enter result will be the same.
Watch windows is one of most commonly used debugging tool with Visual Studio. We generally used to explore the objects, values, properties and other nested objects as a tree structure. Most of the time we used watch window to only view the values or change the current object properties values to see the effects of changed object during debugging. But we can use watch windows for many different purposes. In this blog post I am going to show 10 Tips, that may help you while dealing with Watch Window.
In Mastering in Visual Studio 2010 Debugging article I have discussed about the basic of Object ID creation while debugging. I received some request from some readers to explain the use of “Make Object ID” in details. In this blog post I am going explain how we can track an Object which is already out of scope using by creating a Object ID while debugging.
By using “Make Object ID” option we are informing Visual Studio Debugger to keep track of that object no matter it’s within scope or out of scope for the current context. We can create “Object ID” either from Locals, Autos or from Watch Windows. Object ID is a integer number followed by a pound (#) sign. When we create Object ID for an particular object, Visual Studio Debugger ( CLR Debugging Services ) use an integer value to uniquely identify the object. This “Object ID” allows you to get the object details even if it is out of scope.
In my few previous blog post I have explained how we can customize the Debugging windows view during debugging of application using “DebuggerBrowseable “ attributes and “DebuggerDisplay” , then I have also explained use of “DubuggerHidden” attribute which tells the Visual Studio debugger that the method is hidden from the debugging process and while debugging. In this blog post I am going to explain one similar features of “DebuggerHidden” attributes, named “DebuggerStepThrough”
Marking a piece of code using DebuggerStepThrough attribute tells the Visual Studio debugger that, the code block will be stepped over from debugging process. you can mark methods, properties with DebuggerStepThrough attributes where you don’t want to stop your code to break.
If there is any break point inside a code section which is marked as “DebuggerStepThrough” attributes, that code block will be marked as “[External code]” in stack Trace. Where as “Debugger hidden” attributes didn’t marked is External code.
“Track Change” one of the best interesting features in visual studio which indicates the code changes with a color indicator at the beginning of the line. Generally we know about the two color indicator “Green” and “Yellow” which are used indicting the color change till VS 2008 along with those VS 2010 introduced another new color “Orange” which indicates some additional track change for undoing file after save. In this blog post I am going to explain how those color indicator helps developers to track the code changes.
In Visual Studio 2010, there is three color indicator
Green color indicates the lines which you have edited before your last save. Save again the file and green mark will be disappear.
Yellow color indicates the lines which you have edited since the last save of that file. Yellow becomes Green after saving of the file. Once you close the file that indication disappears.
This color indication has newly introduced in VS 2010. This color will come when user does an undo after a save operation for that current file. Orange color indicates that current changed line is different from the saved version of the file.
In this post I have explained how you can use Obsolete attributes to mark some methods which are not no longer in used or may be remove in future release of the class. During the development cycle we may need to change the name or declaration of certain methods which may be using by some other developers. In this case if you changed the name or declaration of that method, application may crash in different point of times as it’s being used by other developer in the application. In this case you can use System.ObsoleteAttributes class to generate compiler warning and indicate the method as Obsolete.
In this post I am going to discuss about few tips on customizing debugging debugging windows. This may be very helpful during debugging of application. While debugging, you may want to simplify debug window or you may want to clean up all the unnecessary fields that are not important during debugging from debugging windows. Here is few tips for customization of debug window.
Use DebuggerBrowsable attribute to customize the debugging windows
Use DebuggerDisplay attribute to customize the debugging display.
To use above attributes you have to use System.Diagnostics namesapce
