Sol 3

People often ask me at conferences for PC hardware recommendations.  Specifically - ''what type of machine do you recommend I get for doing development with Visual Studio?'' and/or ''your laptop seems really fast, what type is it?'' Some of my recommendations on this topic are fairly standard and obvious: Ideally you want to get a ...

Earlier this year I blogged about a new language extensibility feature of C# and VB called ''Extension Methods''.  Extension methods allow developers to add new methods to the public contract of an existing CLR type, without having to sub-class it or recompile the original type.  In doing so they enable a variety ...

One of the questions I get asked fairly regularly is: ''how can I can easily change different configuration settings in my web.config file based on whether my application is in a dev, qa, staging or production mode?''  The most common scenario for this is one where an application uses different database connection-strings for testing ...

Over the last year we've seen several people report having performance problems when using F5 to run/debug ASP.NET 2.0 applications using Visual Studio 2005.  The problem in theses cases typically wasn't with building the project, but rather that it sometimes took the debugger a really long time to hit the first breakpoint once it attached ...