So Visual Studio 2010 has this cool new feature called Reference Highlighting. If you don’t know anything about it yet, go and read the excellent Visual Studio Tips & Tricks blog to find out how to use it. What Zain Nabousi’s post doesn’t say however is that you can also customize the color of t... [More]

In my previous post, I showed how you could use a T4 template within Visual Studio to generate a C# ImageLibrary class based on a WPF file called ImageResources.xaml. If you want to do something similar but the resource file is not in the same folder as the template, you should refer to it using it... [More]

Adding an image in WPF is very straight forward. All you need to do is declare an Image element in XAML and specify the path of the image in the Source attribute: <Image Source="about.png" /> But rather than deploying all your image files with your application, you might want to e... [More]

A couple of weeks ago, I started getting a VerificationException on a newly created unit test project which had already a bunch of tests in it. The full message was: method [TEST_METHOD_NAME] threw exception. System.Security.VerificationException: Operation could destabilize the runtime. For ... [More]

Today my colleague Rob pointed out to me that enabling Code Analysis (aka FxCop) on our solution was slowing down the build time on his machine to a rather unacceptable level. After some very unscientific perf testing, watch in hand, we saw the build time increase by more than 20 seconds with code a... [More]

With January almost over, my new project at work is now well under way. The application that I’m working on is essentially a WPF smart client that will be built on top of Composite WPF (aka PRISM) and follow the well-established Model View ViewModel (MVVM) pattern. As it has been almost a year since... [More]

A lot of Developers who have never seen ReSharper in action often do not appreciate how much more productive they could be if they would start using it. Their arguments for not trying it out usually ranges from “I don't want to rely on a tool to do my coding” to “Why should I use R# when Visual Stud... [More]

Up until a couple of months ago, I’ve been coding at home either on my company laptop or my own PC. The problem is that neither are decent enough to do any kind of serious Development. I was constantly fighting the machines and grew increasingly frustrated with using sub-standard equipment. So I eve... [More]

Some time ago, while reinstalling StyleCop for ReSharper, I had to restart Visual Studio in order to reload the add-in. I then realised that restarting VS actually requires quite a lot of ‘clicking’ around. First you have to exit the editor, then you need to launch Visual Studio again and finally yo... [More]

In my previous post I mentioned that I  usually work in full screen mode with all the toolbars removed to maximise the amount of code I can see on the screen. To activate full screen mode I just type Shift + Alt + Enter. Note that you can also squeeze in that little extra space by disabling the... [More]