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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
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
In a WinForms project, you can prompt the user to select a file by using the OpenFileDialog control: When you call ShowDialog(), it’ll prompt the user to select a file: When the user clicks Open, you’ll be able to get the file path they selected from the OpenFileDialog.FileName property. To use the OpenFileDialog control, drag … 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
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.
You need to auto-increment your build numbers in order to easily tell which code you’re working with. In this article I’ll explain how to auto-increment your build numbers in Visual Studio. I’ll be using text templating to generate the Assembly Version. Update (2021-3-27): I added information about how to handle this .NET Core projects. 1 … Read more
