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Articles about using the Visual Studio IDE for developing .NET projects.
When you want multiple projects in a solution to use the same project settings (some or all), you can put the settings in a shared props file. There are two ways to do this: I’ll show how to do these two options below. Note: You can also use a combination of these two. Put settings … Read more
Since VS2019, you can set multiple startup projects in the solution’s properties. This is useful when you have multiple projects in the same solution that you want to start at the same time (with or without debugging). Before this, you’d have to set a project as the startup project, start it, then repeat with all … Read more
Warnings are easy to ignore and forget about, which isn’t good. They point out potential problems that you might want to fix. To make it easier to pay attention to warnings, you can treat them like errors. You can choose which warnings to treat like errors by using settings in the project file. There are … Read more
Mapping classes to UI controls manually is probably the most tedious thing you can do in coding. In order to minimize this coding effort, you can bind your controls to an object data source. In this article, I’ll show how to do this in a WinForms App (.NET Core) project. First, I’ll show step-by-step how … Read more
When you want to share a file between multiple projects, instead of duplicating the file’s contents, you can add a link to the existing file. You can link any type of file, but it’s most commonly done with config / source files. Here’s an example of adding appsettings.json as a linked file: In the project … Read more
When you use the Implement Interface quick action in Visual Studio, it generates all members that throw exceptions, even the property getters and setters: This is fine for methods, but not for properties. You’d expect it to generate auto properties. Instead, it generates getters/setters that you then have to go clean up. Fortunately, this behavior … Read more
Breakpoints cause execution to pause when you’re running the debugger. This is referred to as breaking, and it allows you to look at the current state of things for debugging purposes. In some cases, you may want to use a conditional breakpoint to only break execution when certain conditions are met (ex: break when name … Read more
Devs want the option to create new projects in Visual Studio without all of the minimalist stuff that was recently added (top-level statement, minimal API). At the very least, these features should be optional instead of being the default without a way to opt-out (to be fair, minimal API is optional). What I typically do … Read more
When you build a project / solution in Visual Studio, the Up-to-date Check feature will determine if the project needs a full rebuild or if it’s already up-to-date. There are many factors it checks – mainly, did the source code change since last time? Surprisingly, one thing that triggers a full rebuild is text template … Read more
Problem You have a project that is using text templating and you’re upgrading to a new version of Visual Studio. When you open the project, you get error messages about not being able to import the Microsoft.TextTemplating.targets project: Project “…\v16.0\TextTemplating\Microsoft.TextTemplating.targets” was not imported by “…SomeProject.csproj” at (7,3), due to the file not existing. The error … Read more
Visual Studio 2022 has a feature called IntelliCode completions that suggests full line completions as you’re typing. It’s enabled by default. It shows a greyed out suggestion based on what it thinks you’re going to want. This is different from the regular IntelliSense modal popup that shows below the line you’re typing. Here’s what it … Read more
It’s important to add .gitignore to your git repository. This tells git which files in your source directory to not track. Without this, you end up pushing lots of unnecessary files to your repository – such as build output files. The simplest way to add .gitignore is by using Visual Studio. This initializes it with … Read more
You don’t need to manually create a unit test project (through the UI or through the command line). Instead, you can can use the Create Unit Tests command in Visual Studio to generate a unit test project, add it to the solution, and wire up a test stub all at once. Note: This approach can … Read more
If you have a method with a parameter, and that parameter is not used in the method, then you’ll get the IDE0060 message telling you to remove the unused parameter. Here’s an example of code that would trigger this message: The encrypt parameter isn’t being used in the Send() method, triggering the IDE0060 message: IDE0060 … Read more
When you create a new project in .NET Core, and you try to use a class from ADO.NET, such as SqlConnection, you’ll get missing reference errors. For example, your code might look something like this, and it’ll have red-squiggly lines under SqlConnection: In the past, you’d simply add a reference to System.Data.SqlClient, like this: To … Read more
The simplest way to copy files post-build in a .NET project is to use the MSBuild Copy Task in the .csproj file, like this: Note: I’m using VS2019. My project is called NotesAPI. When I build, it logs the following messages: It copied the following build files into C:\Build\NotesAPI: NotesAPI.dll NotesAPI.pdb In this article, I’ll … Read more
You can exclude specific code from being compiled by using conditional compilation symbols. There are a few predefined symbols that support common scenarios – conditional compilation based on target framework (ex: .NET 5 vs .NET Core 3.1) and based on build configuration (Debug vs Release). In addition, you can add your own symbols to handle … Read more
.NET Analyzers (which replaces FxCop) ships with the .NET 5 SDK. If you have the .NET 5 SDK installed, then you can enable .NET Analyzers by adding properties to the .csproj file. You can use this even if your project isn’t targeting .NET 5. If you don’t have the .NET 5 SDK installed, but want … Read more
Here’s the quick way to remove an icon from a WinForm: Open the form properties. Right-click on Icon. Click Reset. It’ll revert to the default icon. Removing an icon without the UI You may be interested in how to remove an icon without going through the Visual Studio UI. You may want to remove the … Read more
Problem You’re trying to add the AssemblyVersion attribute to your project, like this: And you get the following compiler errors: Error CS0579 Duplicate ‘AssemblyVersion’ attribute Error CS0579 Duplicate ‘AssemblyFileVersion’ attribute But you don’t see these attributes anywhere else in your project. Solution The problem is Visual Studio auto-generates the assembly info by default. To turn … Read more
XML documentation comments serve two purposes: Intellisense shows the comments to devs using your code. You can generate a documentation file and include it in your build and nuget package. In this article I’ll show how to automatically generate an XML documentation file and how to include it in a nuget package. 1 – Write … Read more
If you’re using the built-in MSTest unit testing framework, you may be used to the old way of asserting exceptions by using the [ExpectedException] attribute. The following example illustrates one of the key problems with this approach: The ArgumentNullException is being thrown, so the test passes. However, the exception is being thrown in the arrange … Read more
When you create a new project in Visual Studio the default directory is C:\Users\<userName>\Source\Repos. This article shows you how to change that. Steps Open Visual Studio. Click Tools > Options… Change the Projects location. Results Now when you create a project it’ll default to this location.
Problem The Class Diagram item is missing in Visual Studio. Note: I ran into problem starting in VS2019. Solution For some reason this is not installed by default in Visual Studio, so we simply need to install it. 1. In Visual Studio click Tools > Get Tools and Features… 2. Close Visual Studio. 3. In … Read more
Problem I have a unit test project in Visual Studio 2019. When I click Run All Tests, none of the tests run. I looked in the Tests output window and saw a message that says: Test project does not reference any .NET NuGet Adapter. Test discovery or execution might not work for this project. It’s … Read more
