blogs.conchango.com

A customer recently contacted me saying that they had upgraded to Visual Studio 2008 and had also taken the opportunity to switch from a Web Site Project to a Web Application Project.  A while back I'd helped them to centralise some of their configuration so that they only had a single copy of all the configuration sections that were ...

A while ago (June last year) I wrote a utility to detect runs of duplicate lines in files, which is useful for looking for repetitive code that should be refactored. Then I stopped work on it, since it was done.  The original blog post is here and the project is up on CodePlex here. This year I have revisited it with two new features which I ...

xmlDocument.SelectNodes with xmlns="..." Spent most of today wondering why I couldn't update a connection string in a web.config file using xpath which had the default namespace for xmlns  defined at the root of the config file. e.g. <configuration ...

I found more things to do with sandcastle after part 1 and part 2. Here's a trick that made the sandcastle build simpler. The basic problem is that sandcastle must run after all the binaries are built by projects in a solution (so that it can read those binaries), but before the WiX installer is built (so that the sandcastle output ...

Further to my last post on sandcastle in TFS builds, I wanted to update on the complications that have happened in the last week.  Sandcastle docs and Wix installers.Our installer, built in WiX v3, acts as a project inside the solution and builds last, rolling up the output of the other projects into an MSI file. The sandcastle action ran ...

Sandcastle is a tool from Microsoft to generate documentation as help files from the XML comments in your c# (or vb.net) code.The latest version is the September 2007 CTP, announced here: http://blogs.msdn.com/sandcastle/archive/2007/10/02/announcing-september-2007-sandcastle-release.aspxSandcastle has a reputation as being not release quality ...

There are a few things that slow down development of MSBuild-based solutions with Visual Studio.  Typically MSBuild files are named with .proj, .properties or .targets extensions - so when you drag one of these files into the Visual Studio IDE there is no Intellisense. To get around this, go to Tools > Options > Text Editor > File ...