Developer Support

Visual Studio trick to quickly find any file in solution

Andrew Arnott August 2, 2008 Aug 2, 2008 08/2/08

You know that Find text box in the toolbar of Visual Studio?  Those of us who are keyboard-inclined probably never use it because Ctrl+F is quicker than moving your hand to the mouse.  But there is a hidden gem of a feature inside it that really makes me feel like a power user that I wanted to share. That find box doubles as a ...

OpenID and ASP.NET web sites

Andrew Arnott April 14, 2008 Apr 14, 2008 04/14/08

If you are a web developer I hope you've considered accepting OpenID credentials for logging in your users.  If you have an ASP.NET web site, the process of adding OpenID support to your web site couldn't be easier when you use the free C# DotNetOpenId library.  Supporting OpenID is a great idea...

Why you should never use TCHAR in C++ header files

Andrew Arnott February 22, 2008 Feb 22, 2008 02/22/08

In C++, TCHAR, LPCTSTR, CString, and other types discretely change to their char/WCHAR, CStringA/CStringW counterparts depending on whether UNICODE is defined in your source code.  Cool.  By conscientiously using _countof(x) instead of sizeof(x) where appropriate and TCHAR's everywhere instead of char/WCHAR, you can write code that ...

Why your Visual Studio add-in fails to load with error 0x80004005

Andrew Arnott February 15, 2008 Feb 15, 2008 02/15/08

Writing Visual Studio add-ins gives you the power to do some impressive things within the IDE to enhance your productivity.  Unfortunately getting your add-in to load into Visual Studio can sometimes be a pain.  Here's just a tip you should know about the .AddIn file that Visual Studio generates for you. The path you provide to ...

Why double-clicking on an .SLN file doesn’t always launch Visual Studio

Andrew Arnott February 13, 2008 Feb 13, 2008 02/13/08

Well this is my first post as a member of the Visual Studio Platform & Ecosystem team.  My second full day on the job, and I've found some less-than-ideal areas of Visual Studio that I'm eager to improve for myself and for you, our customers.  How exciting.  I'll do my best to post to my blog whenever I run across some ...

Write a NetCF app that provisions your device from your device

Andrew Arnott February 4, 2008 Feb 4, 2008 02/4/08

My first post in the provisioning series introduced what provisioning of your Windows Mobile device means and the basics of why you would want to do it.  In future posts I'll give some concrete examples of XML that accomplish a few common tasks.  But what good are XML examples if you can't try them out on your device or emulator?&...

Microsoft launches MSDN Code Gallery for open-source sharing

Andrew Arnott February 1, 2008 Feb 1, 2008 02/1/08

Microsoft recently launched the MSDN Code Gallery for Microsoft employees and others to share code and software using the Microsoft Public License.  MSDN Code Gallery looks and feels very much like CodePlex, but Code Gallery lacks the TFS source control feature and developers can only publish their source code and binaries as releases.As ...

New job with Visual Studio Platform & Ecosystem

Andrew Arnott January 24, 2008 Jan 24, 2008 01/24/08

I have accepted a new position within Microsoft with the Visual Studio Platform & Ecosystem team.  Rather than working on the .NET Compact Framework I will be working on "VS10".  I don't actually make the transition for a few more weeks, so I look forward to several more posts on NetCF topics before leaving...

XmlSerializer compatibility between NetCF and the desktop

Andrew Arnott January 23, 2008 Jan 23, 2008 01/23/08

The XmlSerializer found in the .NET Compact Framework has a very different implementation than the one found in the full .NET Framework.  The reasons for the differences include size and performance constraints that make the desktop's XmlSerializer inappropriate for devices.  As a result of the different implementation, there are ...

Using the XmlSerializer as an XmlObjectSerializer with WCF

Andrew Arnott January 18, 2008 Jan 18, 2008 01/18/08

The Windows Communication Foundation introduced the new DataContractSerializer to replace the XmlSerializer in many scenarios.  The DataContractSerializer is faster than the XmlSerializer, but has certain limitations.  For example it does not support serializing an object's members as XML attributes.  When you write a WCF client that calls ...