Visual Studio .NET

Visual Studio 2005, Wrong comparing strings with Assert.AreEquals

Raúl Alarcón García-Cuevas — Thu, 25 Aug 2005 09:49:00 GMT

I'm using Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2 developing an application. In the Unit Testing Features, when you use Assert.AreEquals to compare strings, if they aren't equal, the method stop the test (that's correct) but doesn't exists any place where you can see at which character differs the strings... The equivalent method in NUnit shows you where the strings differs, I'm very wrong with this issue, I can't understand how have been able to forget this aid.

Visual Studio 2003 very slow starting

Raúl Alarcón García-Cuevas — Tue, 26 Apr 2005 11:22:00 GMT

Lately, I become experimenting a long delay when Visual Studio starts. The Projects MRU list is the guilty. When you have a web project pointing to somewhere in a remote machine, Visual Studio tries to get some information from that machine. I have found information about this issue searching through google at this blog: http://dotnetjunkies.com/WebLog/alexchang/archive/2004/05/04/12730.aspx

I resolve this issue cleaning the MRU lists in the registry, concretely the removing all entries for the "ProjectMRUList" and "FileMRUList" keys (searching everywhere), but to work fine, you need to do that with Visual Studio closed.

.NET Exception Handling

Raúl Alarcón García-Cuevas — Wed, 23 Feb 2005 10:14:00 GMT

Here is an article, from "The Code Project" factory, about best practices for exception handling in .NET. The article covers all aspects about this matter, sometimes risky when we are writing code. Everybody knows that exception handling is one of the mechanism provided by high level languages with which coders must deal daily, in my opinion, only the forty percent of the wrote code is related with the logic of the problem, the other sixty percent is wrote to control errors and exceptions, this is the importance of exception handling!.

Enjoy the article!

ASP.NET Error: The server tag is not well formed

Raúl Alarcón García-Cuevas — Thu, 28 Oct 2004 15:21:00 GMT

This is the error that I get if try to view an aspx page with any server control that uses the DataBinder.Eval function, like the following

<asp:Button id=but Text="Button" runat="server" CommandArgument="<%# DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem, ("ColIndex")) %>"> </asp:Button>

The problem is that the ASP.NET parser does not allows nested double quotes. The solution is very easy, use single quotes for the HTML property instead of double quotes:

<asp:Button id=but Text="Button" runat="server" CommandArgument='<%# DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem, ("ColIndex")) %>'></asp:Button>

The most probably is the problem raises before you are trying to view the page in the browser, when you want to switch between the HTML view and the Design view in the Visual Studio editor, the development environment show a message with the following text:

---------------------------
Microsoft Development Environment
---------------------------
Could not open in Design view. Quote values differently inside a '<% ..."value"... %>' block.
---------------------------

I think that the message doesn't help you too much to identify the problem...

A "must-have" tool for Visual Studio .NET

Raúl Alarcón García-Cuevas — Sun, 08 Aug 2004 12:23:00 GMT

Recently, I have discovered a very usefully tool for developers. This tool is fully integrated with Visual Studio .NET, is simple to use and gives to the developer a powerfully way to minimize the spent time with recurrent coding tasks like write properties for classes only specifying the type and the name for the property...

The tool is based on templates to define recurrent parts of code that the developers must write (properties, try / catch blocks, methods...). After you have defined a template for some coding work, you invoke it directly while you are coding, by example:

We have defined a template to write properties, in the template you must specify the type for the property and the name. The template is invoked with the following command from the code editor:

string Name p

Then, press ctrl+enter and this command is transformed in the following code snippet:

private string _name;
public string Name
{
get { return _name; }
set { _name = value; }
}

Autocode is the name of that tool and you can download it (for free) from www.devprojects.net. The web have a lot of templates for code substitution that you can download, as well as, documentation to make your own templates.

Enjoy it!

Embedding Files into Assemblies

Raúl Alarcón García-Cuevas — Wed, 09 Jun 2004 11:46:00 GMT

With Visual Studio .NET 2003, we can specify the "Build Action" property of any file in the solution. This feature bring us the opportunity to embed the content of any file into the result assembly (assemblies) after compilation. It is so simple and can help us when we need some constant data to be deployed with our solution, by example, our application uses an XML schema that (after the application is completed) never changes, and we doesn't like to deploy a separate file with the schema content. Here is a step by step procedure to embed a file into the solution:
1. In the Solution Explorer, right click over the project where we want to have the embedded file, Add / Add Existing Item.
2. Select the file to embed.
3. Show the Property window of the file, and in the property "Build Action", select "Embedded Resource"

After that, when we compile the solution, we have the content of that file into the assembly, but... how we can read this data? Well, here is a method to extract the content of any embedded resource from the assembly using reflection and stream readers:

using System.Reflection;
using System.IO;
private string getEmbeddedResourceContent(string resourceFileName)
{
     Assembly myAsembly = Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly();
     string resName = String.Empty;
     foreach(string resourceName in myAsembly.GetManifestResourceNames())
     {
          if (resourceName.IndexOf(resourceFileName)>=0)
          {
               resName = resourceName;
               break;
          }
     }
     if (resName.Length > 0)
     {
          Stream s = myAsembly.GetManifestResourceStream(resName);
          StreamReader sr = new StreamReader(s, System.Text.Encoding.GetEncoding(1252));
         return sr.ReadToEnd();
     }
     else
     {
          throw new Exception("The resource can't be found");
     }
}

Note that this method only works with text files and that we can use other assemblies distinct of the executing assembly to host the embedded resources.