1. © BJSS Limited 2005 Commercial in Confidence Visual Studio 2008 Productivity Enhancing Tips and Resources Jeff Watkins – 25 September 2008

2. © BJSS Limited 2005 Commercial in Confidence What Problems are Being Addressed?  Traditionally in IDEs, especially Visual Studio Developers spend too much time writing boilerplate code and documentation Searching and navigating through complex projects is cumbersome time consuming Tasks such as testing and refactoring are poorly represented  The aim is to address all of the points above to allow the developer to spend more time actually writing the business logic

3. © BJSS Limited 2005 Commercial in Confidence Types of Productivity Enhancement  These cover several areas Environment Setup Environment and Language Usage Integrated Tools Additional Free Tools Additional Paid For Tools Resources, where to go next

4. © BJSS Limited 2005 Commercial in Confidence Environment Setup  Set up directories, indentation etc. before starting a project.  State other preferences, such as: Open HTML pages in Source View Track the current file in Solution Explorer Change the Start page or get rid of it Change the default font-size to a smaller size so you can see more code. Turn off animations  Keep your projects clean, place test packages in a separate project to the main code.

5. © BJSS Limited 2005 Commercial in Confidence Environment and Language Usage  Learn key bindings Useful items like auto comment and block select get overlooked See Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 key binding reference poster Create your own bindings to custom macros  Use bookmarks and splitter panes to quickly refer to different parts of code at once  Optimise compilation options to save time  Regular expressions can be used in find/replace Useful for larger searches  Use Code Snippets to aid code reuse These are kept for you by the IDE for insertion into the code as and when the developer sees fit

6. © BJSS Limited 2005 Commercial in Confidence Environment and Language Usage #2  Automatic properties New feature for.NET 3.5, saves a lot of boilerplate code being written  Conditional Breakpoints Right click the breakpoint and add an expression to evaluate  The task list Mark your code with TODO and HACK comments and they will appear on the task list

7. © BJSS Limited 2005 Commercial in Confidence Integrated Tools  The Refactoring tool, use where possible to Rename Encapsulate Inherit Extract Interfaces  Testing Testing Tools, run tests and capture code coverage automatically. Keeps an archive of test run results. Automated Test Generation  Creates correctly named file and sample tests based on exposed properties and methods etc.  Code Analysis Points out unmaintainable pieces of code

8. © BJSS Limited 2005 Commercial in Confidence Additional Tools (Free)‏  Free tools and Addins (get automatically added to your Visual Studio menus)‏ Installers available in shared directory These have been cherry-picked from lists of the highest rated tools  StyleCop Microsoft implementation Allows customisable style rules Quick and simple way to pick up coding style problems Installer available on shared drive  FXCop Profiles built assembly, looks more at the access rules, interfaces etc. Quick and easy way to pick out potentially vulnerable code

9. © BJSS Limited 2005 Commercial in Confidence Additional Tools (Free) #2  GhostDoc Allows you to document code automatically Needs some extra flower-boxing around the comments to make it HboS compliant but otherwise does a good job  PowerCommands Various mini tools for making navigation in Visual Studio easier  Reopen closed files  Collapse all projects in solution  Extract constant from pasted text  etc.  ProfileSharp Does a rudimentary job of profiling console applications, services and websites Allows you to see what methods are taking up the most CPU time and or memory Nowhere near as stable or as friendly as dotTrace (which is not free)‏

10. © BJSS Limited 2005 Commercial in Confidence Additional Tools (Paid For)‏  Resharper Powerful set of tools for.NET, mainly C# based (hence the name) but also available for VB. Includes code analysis, cleanup, refactoring and generation tools that are more richly featured than the Microsoft equivalents. Free 30 day trial available, full license isn't prohibitively expensive (280 Euros).  dotTrace The most useful tool of all (in the author’s opinion). A simple way to dramatically improve application performance by identifying the methods which are taking the greatest amount of time and or memory. Licensing the same as Resharper.

11. © BJSS Limited 2005 Commercial in Confidence Online Resources  Dot Net Tip of the Day (http://dotnettipoftheday.org)‏  MSDN Code Gallery (http://code.msdn.microsoft.com)‏http://code.msdn.microsoft.com  Visual Studio Gallery (http://www.visualstudiogallery.com)‏http://www.visualstudiogallery.com  Got Code Snippets? (http://www.gotcodesnippets.net)‏

12. © BJSS Limited 2005 Commercial in Confidence Questions?