Learn F# for the masses

Anyone who reads my blog will have observed that I've not posted anything for several months now. In addition to my moving country and trying to build a company in 2016, I've also been writing a book. I'm delighted to now share that Learn F# is now available on Manning's MEAP program - hopefully the …

Visual Studio Team Services and FAKE

What is VSTS? Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) is Microsoft's cloud-based source control / CI build / work item tracking system (with a nice visual task board). It's a platform that is evolving relatively quickly, with lots of new features being added all the time. It also comes with a number of plans including a …

Lightweight websites with F#

There are several common approaches I've seen people take on the .NET platform when writing web-based applications that I want to review in terms of language and framework choice: -Adopt a conventional MVC application approach. Write static HTML that is emitted from the server using e.g. Razor markup + C# / VB .NET, write your …

Better git integration for VS 2012

git seems to be everywhere these days doesn’t it. Everyone is using it, and looking for any excuse to blog today, I wanted to share both my early experiences with it, and the new Microsoft git plugin for VS2012. Initial thoughts on git Pretty much like everyone else, I imagine. Branching is much easier to …

A brief word on namespacing for framework classes

I’ve spent a lot of time over the past few years working on multi-developer projects. It’s incredibly important that you ensure that the pit of success is large for other developers. Obviously there will always be a learning experience, which hopefully can be alleviated through pairing and / or decent developer documentation, either through test …

Editing XAML files in Visual Studio 2012

Finally, after three attempts, Microsoft have gotten a decent XAML editor into Visual Studio. Well done! I’ve been doing some Windows Phone development recently, and using VS2012 professional for it. I also have Blend installed - I’ve blogged in the past about the positive impact it can have on a developer’s productivity. That still applies …

Top Visual Studio 2010 Extensions

Been a while since I did this… here’s my current set of top extensions that I use on VS2010: - NuGet Package Manager The easiest way to bring in dependencies of third party packages bar none. Microsoft now use it as their primary way for new drops of EF. I use it for my Unity …

Expression Blend – a powerful tool for developers

I’ve been experimenting with the use of Expression Blend as a tool in the life-cycle for day-to-day development for a typical .NET developer that might be writing an application using Silverlight with some sort of implementation of MVVM. Having used Visual Studio 2010 as my primary, all-in-one tool for developing applications, I was somewhat sceptical …

CodeRush Review Part 2

Continuing my review of CR… In my first posting I gave an overview of some of the main differences between CR and CRX. I want to touch upon some of the other features that I didn’t mention in my last post, as well as give an update on how I’m finding using CR. Code Templates …

CodeRush Review Part 1

I decided to give the full CodeRush + Resharper! suite a go, with a view to upgrading from the free (and excellent) CodeRush Express Visual Studio 2010 plugin. I really like CRX, to the extent that in the past I have explicitly removed an install of Resharper because it interfered with CRX too much. So, …