Orcas

Code Length Guidelines in Visual Studio

Adam Calderon — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 20:53:00 GMT

If you have ever presented or written an article you probably have ran across a situation where the code you have written contains lines that are to long and you need to modify them to fit on the screen or page. This can be a real pain especially when you write code using a wide screen monitor with a high resolution. Well for the past few years I have just lived with this issue until I ran across this really cool blog entry Guidelines - A hidden feature for the Visual Studio Editor by Sara Ford that details how to modify your registry setting to get guidelines in the Visual Studio editor. Once I modified my registry setting, lines showed up in the editor giving me a visual clue of how long my code lines were. At last no more code hacking! For those of you who don’t know who Sara Ford is she is a prolific blogger of all things Visual Studio related and a great source for all kinds of little trinkets on the subject.

Visual Studio 2008 Peformance Profiler

Adam Calderon — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 13:32:00 GMT

The Visual Studio Performance Profiler in Visual Studio 2008 is leaps and bounds better than it’s predecessor but as always finding any information on Beta technology is not the easiest thing to do. To help out I have included a few blog entries that are helping me understand what VS 2008 has to offer and a few that cover some background information as well.

This first blog entitled Solving WPF Performance Problems: Step 1 is a great blog by Tim Cahill that you can use to get started with. It covers VS 2005 but included a few good tidbits including a link to a website that contains the debug symbols for the Microsoft DLLs. Tim also has another blog Profiling WPF Applications from the Command Line that describes how to use the command line with the profiler. The examples cover startup and already running application scenarios which are now supported in the UI in VS 2008.

Ian Hu has a series of blog entries that cover the profiler in VS 2008 showing off a lot of the cool new features that make this profiler the best yet from Microsoft.

Collecting performance counter information with the Visual Studio Team System profiler

Pinpoint a performance issue using hotpath in Visual Studio 2008

The New Developer Menu in Visual Studio Team System

The Visual Studio Profiler Data Collection Control Part 1: Excluding Application Startup Time

Comparing performance reports with the Visual Studio Team System Profiler

Orcas Beta1 Golden Gem #1

Adam Calderon — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 17:31:00 GMT

So one of my new favorite features in Orcas is intellisense in javascript. I have always disliked typing things in blindly and hoping when I run the page all is well. Now I don’t have to do this since Microsoft has created this handy new feature. So let me show you a sample that demonstrates how this works.

So this sample is a new web project that has a default.aspx page and a simple “hello world” web service called AjaxWebService.asmx.

The code you will see is in a script block on the default.aspx page that has a ScriptManager control on it that has a servicereference that points to the AjaxWebService. The series of images below show how you can start with the main namespace and walk down to the method that you want to call in the web service.

Namespace Level

Class Level

Method and Properties Level

Method Call Level

So the cool thing about this is that Orcas figured out that my web service had the ScriptServices attribute applied to the class and that the HelloWorld method had the WebMethod attribute and knew what to do. It was like it just created a proxy in the background and then presented that proxy as a class that I could then use in javascript. The thing that made this possible was the ScriptManager control on the page and the web service in the servicereference (see below).

<asp:ScriptManager ID="ScriptManager1" runat="server">

<asp:ServiceReference Path="AjaxWebService1.asmx" />

</Services>

</asp:ScriptManager>

Now my next great idea was to get intellisense working with a regular javascript file. So I created a javascript file called JScript1.js and added the code below to it using the prototype format.

Type.registerNamespace("Demo");

Demo.Person = function(firstName, lastName, emailAddress) {

this._firstName = firstName;

this._lastName = lastName;

this._emailAddress = emailAddress;

}

Demo.Person.prototype = {

getFirstName: function() {

return this._firstName;

getLastName: function() {

return this._lastName;

getName: function() {

return this._firstName + ' ' + this._lastName;

dispose: function() {

alert('bye ' + this.getName());

}

Demo.Person.registerClass('Demo.Person', null, Sys.IDisposable);

// Notify ScriptManager that this is the end of the script.

if (typeof(Sys) !== 'undefined') Sys.Application.notifyScriptLoaded();

I then thought great I should now get intellisense in my script block but NOOOO. I now had to add the script to the scriptreference in the ScriptManager before I could get things to work (see below).

<asp:ScriptManager ID="ScriptManager1" runat="server">

<asp:ServiceReference Path="AjaxWebService1.asmx" />

</Services>

<asp:ScriptReference path="JScript1.js" />

</Scripts>

</asp:ScriptManager>

Now once I did this the Demo namespace came up (see below) and I could work with the person class.

Namespace Level

Class Level (you know the drill now…)

I hope this was helpful in seeing how all of this new intellisense stuff works and if anyone has any other things they have seen please feel free to add to the comments of this blog. I have also included the sample application I used for this to help in following along. The next thing I have to show off is debugging. You will absolutely freak on this one!