Visual Studio 2005
Visual Studio Hangs on a Team Foundation Server UNDO Command
Dec 13th
Ran into a real pain in the @ss today. While working with Team Foundation Server I was refactoring a couple of projects and at one point I needed to “Undo” my changes. This is normally accomplished by what you see on the left.
Well, to my dismay, as soon as I clicked on that button, Visual Studio 2005 would HANG. I mean, it would just stop. The only way to get it to respond (and yes this is odd) was to go to Task Manager, then right click on the application (on the Applications tab) and then click “Minimize” then click “Maximize” and the app would respond. Unfortunately the “Undo” didn’t happen though.
I looked all around the net, and couldn’t find anything. I did the following…
devenv /resetskippkgs (didn’t work)
devenv /resetsettings (or something like that – anyway – it didn’t work)
I also installed hot fixes that seemed to be related to this problem. Didn’t work. Reboot – didn’t work. Installed last nights updates – didn’t work.
I repaired Team Foundation Explorer – didn’t work.
As a last resort I decided to take VS2005 back to its clean slate state by firing off this command. This command is kind of hidden and is not supported by Microsoft (details – all the way at the bottom of that link).
Fix: devenv /resetuserdata
MSDN – Disclaimer: you will lose all your environment settings and customizations if you use this switch. It is for this reason that this switch is not officially supported and Microsoft does not advertise this switch to the public through devenv /? command.
After I fired that bad boy off, waited a few minutes and fired up VS2005 and everything worked again. Thank the big baby jeebus for not having to re-install VS2005 or use a MS Support call.
Full path to the solution file… too long?
Dec 5th
I was creating a solution file for an application at a client and I got this error message.
Sara Ford explains why this happens here. The OS limit is 260 chars for the MAX_PATH variable according to Sara Ford’s blog.
So how do you get around it? In this case, Visual studio was creating a folder for my solution. So I just created a solution somewhere else on the system and copied it over to my destination folder. I knew that the files wouldn’t be exceeding the 260 character limit anytime soon so it wasn’t a problem.
But what if you do need to exceed the file path? Easy, create a file share. Share a folder as a new drive on your machine, then create the solution on the new share (its still in the old folder) but you’re referencing it with the new path. Kind of a kludge, but it works.
Auto-Insert Attribute Quotes in HTML
Oct 12th
A quick tip for those of you who don’t use tools like ReSharper that automatically put the attribute quotes in for you when typing HTML.
Don’t you hate it when you’re typing in the HTML window of an ASPX page and you have to type in the quotes for an attribute value on element? I do too.
You can fix this by going to Tools > Options > Text Editor > HTML > Format
and checking the box that says “Insert attribute value quotes when typing”.
Check out this short clip that I made to see exactly what I’m talking about (there is NO AUDIO on this clip)
Click the image to view the screencast-clip.
ASP.NET Projects Take Forever To Load in Internet Explorer
Jul 9th
I recently had a problem that plagued me the last couple of weeks.
Problem: When I pressed F5 or CTRL + F5 or even “View in Browser” from Visual Studio (in an ASP.NET project) Internet Explorer would load. If I had any breakpoints set, the debugger would break, and then I could continue after debugging (or, if I didn’t debug the project would continue to load as normal — in Internet Explorer). Once the project continued to load in Internet Explorer (IE), IE would HANG.
I’m not talking a 5-10 second load. I’m talking 2-3 minutes!! After the initial load, the application would load as expected. I could hit refresh, everything and it would load as expected. Unfortunately this isn’t a feasible solution when I need to debug on a normal basis and I cannot be waiting 2-3 minutes for the debugger to start.
The weird about this is… if I opened IE and went to ANY WEBSITE the site would load instantly. The problem was only with ASP.NET projects, making me thing it had to do with the local cassini web server.
Resolution: After some reading, I came to the conclusion that it could be related to a proxy server. I took a look, NOPE, no proxy server here. So then I started poking around with the system. There were no event logs for anything relating browser or .NET issues. I could not find anything related to this issue, other than a couple people having the SAME exact problem.
On a fluke I decided to hit F5, and then while the enormous load time was taking place I started FireFox. I copied the URL from IE (which looked something like: http://localhost:49696/default.aspx) and then posted it into the address bar of FireFox and hit Enter. To my amazement, the page loaded immediately. But IE was still hanging, and waiting.
After changing some settings in the Internet Options panel of IE I decided to reset IE’s settings (see below).
After resetting everything, everything started working again. I’m not sure what setting had started this behavior, but I do know that something in my Internet Settings got changed. Over the next week I’m going to attempt to recreate the issue, and if I’m able to, I’ll post the solution here.
But if you’re having this same problem, reset your settings in IE!
.NET Scaffolding
Jun 21st
Jeremy D. Miller has a great post on keeping source code where it belongs. The thought process behind this is that code should be where YOU would assume it would be. If its data access code, it should be in a project/namespace that is something like Data Access or DAL or Data or something that represents the lower layer of the architecture. If its the business rules/tasks the files should be in a project called Business Rules, or BLL, or Tasks, or something similar. It makes sense, just think about this — if you walk into a business and are given a project that was created by another developer and you’re getting a ADO.NET Exception, you’d expect to find the code Data Access code in a Data Access layer, NOT in the code behind. I should not have to hunt down where you put your data access code.
We’re talking about basic separation of concerns. The thing is, many developers lack these concepts because they’re under the assumption of “I can write this the correct way, and it will take me 2 weeks, or I can do it quickly and it will take me 2 days.” This may not matter when the application is running for a few months, but when you are asked to change the data provider from SQL Server to Oracle, or remove the web service calls and replace them with RPC calls, you’re going to find yourself in a world of hurt because you didn’t set everything up correctly. At this point they have amounted a large amount of Technical Debt.
He also noted that a large number of people were now using Ruby On Rails (RoR) as their development platform and I won’t deny that I also believe that Ruby/Rails is huge right now. Tons of shops are running RoR and even Martin Fowler said on Hansel Minutes that ThoughtWorks was doing about 40% (or more) of their business with Ruby. The key point Jeremy brought up is that “RoR forces web developers into a bit of a straight jacket, but that’s a good thing in a way.” I completely agree. RoR enforces a consistent source code tree layout which allows for developers to easily find there way around a project. “Developer A” can create a project with RoR and then “Developer B” can come along and take a look at it and be familiar with the code layout and structure. The RoR community has agreed that this is the basic way to organize a project and it seems to be working for them.
So what about .NET? Enter Tree Surgeon. Right now, its a stand alone application, but in its near future it should be implemented as a template in Visual Studio 2005/2008. So what is it? It’s a application that will create that straight jacket that Jeremy spoke of. It gives the developer a basic set up of layers, unit tests, code coverage and build script. It builds the entire source code directory and allows you to build on top of it. The source code layout follows a white paper written by Mike Roberts. I’ve been using it for quite awhile and I’m one of the developers on the project. I recently updated the source to allow creation of Visual Studio 2005 projects. Please note, this is only on the source and has not been reflected on the production release. Download the source, run it and then choose a application name, and generate the project source directory tree. Open the solution file and your application is ready to go.
The best part is that its easy to integrate existing projects into this format. I’ve done it quite a few times to allow for easy integration into my clients CI environment.
If you have any requests for Tree Surgeon, please visit the Issue Tracker page and submit and issue.
Enjoy!