Visual Studio Express
Visual Studio Express’ limitations lead to bad practices
Visual Studio Express only has a subset of what you can find in Visual Studio Professional, which makes complete sense, but two missing features actually prevent users from following best programming practices in my opinion. The whole point of Express is to let enthusiasts and students discover the joys of programming – so we might [...]
Target the .NET Compact Framework using Visual Studio Express
Microsoft only supports Visual Studio Professional for developing Windows Mobile applications and, more generally, code based on the .NET Compact Framework. You get nice things like application deployment and emulators and remote debugging and all. But if you just want to compile something against the .NET Compact Framework, for example to check that you’re using [...]
Visual Studio Tips & Tricks
Stephen Walther recently blogged about tricks that every developer should know about Visual Studio. Most of those he mentioned I use on a daily basis, so I highly recommend them. It actually surprises me how many other programmers don’t know about those features. Somehow, most programmers know Visual Studio as much as they know Microsoft [...]
XAML markup is for real men
The Visual Studio designer for WPF is quite lame as it stands now, and although it will get a lot better when Visual Studio 2008 SP1 is released, if you're a WPF developer, you really need to know how to read and write XAML by hand, much like web developers and designers know how to [...]
Regain control over build configurations in Visual Studio Express
I do almost all my development at home with Visual Studio Express. These products are wonderful and free. Well… granted, if they were not free, they would also be less wonderful too, probably. But they're still great pieces of software, and I'm pretty sure they played a critical part in building the vibrant .NET community [...]