Solve real coding problems
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: Use Directory.Build.props. Add settings to this and they’ll automatically apply to all projects. Use your own props file and import it … 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
