This morning I had the honor of joining the Friends of Red Gate, a group of passionate people about great productivity tools. Over the coming months, I will be providing community feedback about tools like the Azure Management Studio.
Continue Reading...Archives For November 30, 1999
The wait is over, Microsoft has released a set of symbols/icons to visually represent features of and systems that use Windows Azure and related technologies. The symbols are in Microsoft Visio, Microsoft PowerPoint and Portable Network Graphics (PNG) formats.
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A few months ago Sébastien Finot was approached to write a book about working with LINQ using LINQPad and I had the honor of being one of the technical reviewers.
If you need to interact with databases, XML, in-memory collections, or remote services, LINQ can make your life simpler. The best way to discover LINQ is with the help of LINQPad, a free IDE whose first goal is to make sure that writing and interacting with your LINQ query is fun and easy. More generally, LINQPad is a C#/VB/F# scratchpad that instantly executes any expression, statement block, or program with rich output formatting and a wealth of features.
With Building Interactive Queries with LINQPad, you will quickly learn everything you need to know to start using LINQ. To accelerate your learning curve, you will discover how to use LINQPad and its features to test your queries interactively and experiment with all the options offered by LINQ.
In all probability, you already know C#, but have you had a chance to try out LINQ? Building Interactive Queries with LINQPad will introduce you to everything LINQ can offer and will let you interact with every example in LINQPad, LINQ’s best companion.
You will learn how to build and experiment with interactive queries with this practical guide illustrated with short and detailed code samples. You will also get acquainted with other cool applications of LINQpad such as testing, code snippet generation, and so on, along with a broad approach to LINQ (to object, to SQL, to XML, and so on).
Using the Dependency Matrix generated by NDepend I recently noticed that it included compiler generated code which isn’t of interest to me at this point in time. I was looking for a way to exclude it from the solutions’ Dependency Matrix. Fortunately, Patrick from NDepend team provided me with a great answer on Stackoverflow.
What is NDepend?
NDepend is a Visual Studio tool to manage complex .NET code and achieve high Code Quality. With NDepend, software quality can be measured using Code Metrics, visualized using Graphs and Treemaps, and enforced using standard and custom Rules.
Hence the software design becomes concrete, code reviews are effective, large refactoring are easy and evolution is mastered.
As developers we usually code for ourselves. What I mean by this, is that we are usually our own audience. We create objects, components and libraries that we use ourselves. We know the ins and outs of our code and because of this we hardly do any defensive coding. Think about code that you inherited throughout your career…
I have decided to centralize my code on GitHub. As of today, you can find the code from my Windows Azure posts, bundled in Brisebois.WindowsAzure.
I also packaged my code and made it available through Nuget.org
To install Brisebois.WindowsAzure, run the following command in the Package Manager Console
PM> Install-Package Brisebois.WindowsAzure
Issues can be logged on GitHub
When ever you have admin rights to your computer, be sure to run Visual Studio as Administrator. This will greatly reduce the number of headaches cause by tools who don’t react the way you expect them to.
Visual Studio is quirky when it comes to user rights. In some cases, it will misbehave and you might not notice it. One example of this can be observed when you are working with Coded UI Tests (CUIT), when Visual Studio is not running as Administrator, the recorder will not have access to all the control properties that are required. This can quickly lead you to think that the tool isn’t worth much!
Another instance where Visual Studio must be running as Administrator, is when you need to create a website under IIS from within Visual Studio. When it isn’t running under Administrator privileges, it will block you and warn you that you need elevated privileges. This is one of the rare instances where Visual Studio explicitly tells you that you that you are required to start it as an Administrator. This is because IIS requires elevated privileges.
These are but two examples of why it is so important to run Visual Studio as an Administrator.
The image to the right, shows
how to set
Visual Studio to always start as Administrator. Right click on the shortcut and go into the advanced… menu. Then be sure to check the Run as administrator check box.
Remember, when ever you have the possibility, it’s best run Visual Studio with full admin rights.
Alexandre Brisebois ☁ 