Podcasts to keep an eye on #1

This .Net Podcast has interesting topics that always score high in the dotnetkicks.com. 

http://altnetpodcast.com/

HOWTO: Creating Test Units in Visual Studio 2008

Today I attended a workshop on Visual Studio Team System 2008 at Microsoft’s official headquarter in my hometown Recife, Brazil. One of the key aspects as a developer that I believe I don’t do a lot of is testing the application.

One of the features that Igor Abade showed us was the Test Unit. It immediately became clear to me how this could be applied in my work environment and how it could eventually become a common practice in my company. Important features could have test units associated and prevent a meltdown when another feature is added or modified.

Check out the step-by-step guide after the break! 

Links to keep an eye on #2

Hey everyone,

This is a quick post just to emphasize a cool blog that I’ve come across this week. Sara Ford’s blog is about cool features and tweaks to Visual Studio to make it work for you. I’ve included it in my RSS reader and will most definitely be keeping an eye on it.

That’s it for now.

Please comment if you feel inclined.

HOWTO: Create Templates in Visual Studio 2008

There are so many features to VS2008 that a beginner might feel overwhelmed and stick to those features that they already know and love. Sticking to what you know is important, but searching and learning might result in productivity gains that’ll keep you ahead. Despite working with VS for some time, I always have the feeling that features that I miss are in there hidden somewhere in those numerous menus. 

The discovery of custom templates was a pleasant surprise and further harnessed my curiosity in the other features in this IDE that I was missing out on. 

For now, however, let’s stick to the Templates and how they might help you make Visual Studio a more friendly environment. 

To understand the benefit we first have to understand the problem.

Problem: Inserting a new project into a solution or a new item into a project may result in a series of repeated tasks that are time consuming and tedious. Sometimes the issue is even greater than the time taken but the lack of automation may result in items and projects with different configurations and a lack of standard.

Real-Life Situation: In my workplace, we have two customized windows forms called RecordBase and FormBase. Virtually every window in our solutions inherit from these two winforms. As simple as it may seem to go into the Designer file and changing the Inherits statement, some people believe very strongly that you shouldn’t mess with the designer file and end up commenting the Inherits in that file and including the Inherits statement in the VB file.

Creating a template is as easy as doing what you’ve done a thousand times -inserting a project or an item and customizing it to your needs- and following a wizard.

So, to create a template for the afore mentioned real-life situation you would do the following:

1. Insert the item to the project and customize it as you would. In my case, switch the inherits in the designer file to a custom inherits.

2. Go to File – > Export Template

Choose the type of template you want to create and from which project.

3.   

If you've chosen an Item Template, you'll select the item that you want to create a template for in this screen.

4.

If you've chosen the Item Template, you can choose references that need to be included whenever this specific Item is inserted.

5. 

Last but not least, you'll include a name for the template, an Icon and a simple description.

6. THAT’S IT! I bet you didn’t think that it would be so simple am I right?

Extra tip: If you want to share the templates you created, just go into the following directory:

\My Documents\Visual Studio 2008\Templates\

Copy the zip files and send them to your colleagues. Once they’ve stored the files in the same location above, VS2008 will do the rest and automatically import the templates.

For more advanced information visit: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/6db0hwky.aspx

Links to keep an eye on

Hello fellow developers,

This is my first post and as I don’t like being clichée, I’ll not bore you with a “Hello, world” title. Instead, I’ll give you some two interesting blogs that keep my software developer neurons happy whenever there’s a new post. Please feel free to post in the comment section your own blog or any interesting blogs that you follow. 

Is This Thing On?  : A great .NET blog by a Microsoft insider.

Coding Horror : Not really a .NET or SQL Server blog but a more general blog that every developer should read for the curious insights.