Deborah's Developer MindScape

One of the very nice things about Visual Studio is that all of the tools you need are in one place. With one integrated development environment, you can build your database, create your resource strings, write your code, write and run unit tests, check into source control, and so on. And if you find another […]

As .NET developers, we sometimes need to convert code from C# to VB or from VB to C#. Bing may have returned the perfect example of what you need, but it is in VB and you need C# code. Or some sample code you downloaded is in C# and you need it in VB. Whatever […]

"Extensions and Updates" is the new name for the Visual Studio 2010 "Extension Manager". With it you can find samples, tools, and Visual Studio extensions. To access it, select Tools | Extensions and Updates from the Visual Studio 2012 menu. Click Online on the left, then Visual Studio Gallery to view available tools and Visual […]

There has been minor controversy over the use of upper case letters in Visual Studio 2012’s menus. No need for concern. If you really hate them you can turn them off! (Upper case characters are sometimes considered to be shouting.) There are three ways to change your menus to proper case: 1) Registry Key a) […]

You would think that giving an application a title and later retrieving that title would be a straightforward thing to do in VB.NET or C#. But it turns out to be a little complex, especially to find the appropriate place to enter the title then to write the appropriate code to retrieve that title. First, […]

Someone asked me about this, and though ampersands in menus is as old as VB 1.0 the question comes up because the associated shortcut keys don’t appear underlined by default in some versions of Windows. Most Windows Forms applications have a menu bar at the top. The menu in my sample application looks like this: […]

One of the many new Visual Studio 2012 features is the Quick Launch bar. With it, you can perform a feature keyword search. The Quick Launch bar provides a list of matches. When you pick one of the matches, Visual Studio launches the associated feature. For example, say you want to turn line numbering on. […]

In this prior post, I introduced the new VS 2010 Database Project. Forget all of it. VS 2012 comes with a new Database Project! I have not yet worked with the new Visual Studio 2012 Database Project, but will write a post as soon as I do. For now, I wanted to provide your choices […]

Had a GREAT time at Visual Studio Live in Redmond earlier this month. If you are looking for the sample code from my talks, you can find it here. Have feedback or questions from the talks? Feel free to post them in the comments below. Enjoy!

For the first time in Visual Studio history, you can open a Visual Studio 2010 project with Visual Studio 2012, save it, and open it again in Visual Studio 2010. They are backwards compatible! If you want to use the new features of the Visual Studio 2012 editor on your current solution before the other […]