Helixoft

Helixoft Blog

Peter Macej - lead developer of VSdocman - talks about Visual Studio tips and automation

Archive for the 'Visual Studio Tips' Category

How To Use TRACE In VS

Monday, March 27th, 2006

I must say that I ignored Trace object and TRACE compilation constant for long time. I've been only using Debug object and DEBUG constant for debugging purposes.
Recently, one user of our VBdocman .NET encountered strange problem which I couldn't reproduce. We all know it. So I created special tracing build for him which logged all [...]

Converting “On Error…” To “Try…Catch”

Thursday, March 9th, 2006

We all know that we should use Try ... Catch instead of On Error... But our VBdocman .NET contains some code ported from VB6. This code naturally uses On Error... and it was OK as long as the code worked correctly.
Recently, we decided to clean the old code and use String.equals method for comparing two [...]

Showing Configuration Drop-down List on Toolbar in VS 2005

Friday, February 17th, 2006

Many people reported that they miss configuration manager drop-down list (Debug/Release) in their VS 2005.

I observed that this happens mostly when you apply VB settings to your IDE. I experienced the same problem. I don't know why guys at Microsoft think that VB programmers don't need configuration manager.
You can however get your drop-down list [...]

Adding Strongly Typed Collection to Project

Thursday, February 9th, 2006

There's not too much to explain about strongly typed collections. There are many articles describing how to implement them. However, there are not so many add-ins or macros that can generate them automatically for you. I needed these collections in my projects as well so I wrote a macro which asks you for item type, [...]

How To Customize Context Menu in VS .NET

Friday, February 3rd, 2006

You already know that you can customize main menu and toolbars and you can place commands or macros on them. Unfortunately you cannot customize context (shortcut, right-click) menu this way in VS .NET 2002 and 2003. You simply cannot invoke context menu in Customize mode. You can do it easily in VS 2005.
For VS 2002/2003 [...]