Blog

Simplify Your Visual Studio for Mac Experience

If you’re a .Net developer with a Mac and love Visual Studio, you’ve probably tried out the fullish Visual Studio application that was released back in September of 2017. My experience has been pretty good with my normal development tasks (ASP.Net Core) but besides some missing functionality, one of my biggest pain points has to do…
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View Your HTML File Directly From Visual Studio Code

One thing I noticed when using VS Code that there was no quick action to view your website changes from this text editor. In the past I would use Notepad++ for simple changes and view those changes by selecting Run > Open in Chrome or hitting the appropriate key binding. It seemed odd to me…
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Custom Exceptions

If you’re not already subscribed to Steve Smith’s Dev tips mailing list, I highly recommend signing up for it here. He provides awesome quick tips. Today’s tip was around custom exception handling which can be found here. Making this small change to your exception handling has definitely saved me from headaches while debugging.

Allow Visual Studio to Recommend NuGet Packages

I first saw this on Scott Hanselman’s blog the other day and wanted to share the tip. Additional details can be found from his blog here. Please note that this feature is only available on Visual Studio 2015 Update 3 and up. Steps to Enable: 1. Launch Visual Studio 2017 2. Select Tools > Options…
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Visual Studio 2017

I came across this cool infographic today from a local user group mailing list and figured I’d share here. It lists some of the new features and improvements in VS2017 as well as some other misc bits of information like some basic git commands. Enjoy! Visual Studio 2017 Infographic

Learning Resources

There’s a ton of great resources out there for learning about programming from basic syntax to more advanced topics like design patterns. There’s plenty of great YouTube videos or blog posts out there but I wanted to compile a list of professional learning resources that I’ve personally used. Spoiler: Pluralsight is my favorite resource for…
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Easily Take Your ASP.Net Application Offline

If you need to take your application offline, simply add a file named “app_offline.htm” to the root directory of your application. This will cause any future requests to be rerouted to this page as handled through IIS. This functionality is available from ASP.Net 2.0 and forward.

Setup TeamCity for a Specific Build Agent

If you ever run into a scenario where you need to run your TeamCity build configuration step against a particular build agent there is a simple solution for you built right into TeamCity. 1. Navigate to your build configuration step by either selecting it from the Overview page or selecting your project, and then the…
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Git and GitHub Basic Concepts

I saw this video series in a newsletter from freecodecamp the other day. It’s a great general overview of Git and GitHub that doesn’t get stuck in the details. I know when I was first being introduced to Git and interacting with the GitHub repository service it was a bit confusing keeping all the terminology…
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git commit -am “Added new file”

The above command is something I used on a project recently as a shortcut to stage and commit the file within the same command. Cool! That saves me from running an extra command. Before, I would stage and track all the files that I’ve been working on with the following: git add . followed by…
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