Continuing the WPF in Visual Studio 2010 series, today’s post is on the subject of “Focus and Activation”. Of all the problems we had to deal with in the new WPF UI, this was probably the most tricky to get right. Focus problems are notoriously hard to debug, partly because interacting with the debugger moves focus again. (Tip: Using a re...

A great way to get fast builds on a multiprocessor computer is to take advantage of as much parallelism in your build as possible. If you have C++ projects, there’s two different kinds of parallelism you can configure. What are the dials I can set? Project-level parallel build, which is controlled by MSBuild, is set at the solution level in Visual...

Introduction When we were developing the current version of MSBuild, we spent a lot of time analyzing builds to determine where our performance issues lay. The standard logging, even on diagnostic verbosity and with the performance summary enabled (/clp:PerformanceSummary=true on the MSBuild command line) doesn’t give us the kind of information we ...

We recently blogged about a crashing bug in the Visual Studio 2010 Release Candidate (RC) on machines using UI Automation (UIA).  We’ve since discovered that there are actually two bugs, both of which will only affect a certain group of users but will cause the IDE to be very unstable for those users.  Both of these issues now have patches availabl...

This post, the second in a series of articles on Visual Studio 2010’s use of WPF, covers tips and techniques for optimizing performance of WPF applications, and also several areas where we needed to tune Visual Studio 2010 in order to squeeze the best out of WPF. The first post in the series covered the motivation for selecting WPF and some of the ...

This post describes a problem we encountered and solved during the development of Visual Studio 2010 when we rewrote some components in managed code. In this post I’ll describe the problem and what we did to solve it. This is a rather lengthy technical discussion and I apologize in advance for its dryness. It’s not essential to understand every det...

  If you find out that after trying out one of the beta versions of the new Visual Studio 2010 and uninstalling it together with the .NET Framework 4 or uninstalling only .NET Framework 4, every time you try to load a project on Visual Studio 2008 you face the following error:   “Unable to read the project file ‘Project.proj’. MSBuildTo...

The upcoming .NET Framework 4 and Visual Studio 2010 (now in RC) has a lot of exciting new features. From BigInt and parallel libraries, to code contracts, CLR side by side, a new project system for C++ and multi-targeting. Just to name a few. There is much more. No matter what features you are the most interested in, you can start exploring. Conv...

I have had several customers asking me about MSBuild and how to get started learning the language and using it. A little over a year and a half ago, I joined the MSBuild team. When I got here, I did not even know what MSBuild was, and I have been a Visual Studio user for many years. This article is to help you understand what MSBuild is, how it rel...

We had in the last days a couple of reports of Visual Studio’s background flickering on old LCD monitors because of the texture and the colors used by default by the shell. So far we have not been able to reproduce in-house the problem (and I suspect this is caused by either old video card drivers or monitors not supporting properly the vertical r...