Pex: Automated Exploratory Testing for .NET
Pex (Program EXploration) is an intelligent assistant to the programmer. From a parameterized unit test, it automatically produces a traditional unit test suite with high code coverage. In addition, it suggests to the programmer how to fix the bugs. Watch the screencast!
Introduction
IronPython Studio is a free full IDE (Integrated Development Environment) for the Python programming language. It is based on the existing IronPython example that is included in the VS SDK.
IronPython Studio is based on the Visual Studio 2008 Shell runtime (royalty free) and can be installed without requiring any version of Visual Studio.
Overview
Visual Studio 2008 Web Deployment Projects is an add-in to Visual Studio 2008 which provides developers with advanced compilation and deployment options… A Web Deployment project is extensible, enabling web developers to create pre-build and post-build actions…
Download Location
You can download this RTW version from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=0AA30AE8-C73B-4BDD-BB1B-FE697256C459&displaylang=en
Feature Summary
A Web Deployment project provides the following features for building and deploying ASP.NET 2.0 Web sites:
- ASP.NET 2.0 precompilation as part of the build process.
- More flexible options for generating compiled assemblies from a Web project, including these alternatives:
- A single assembly for the entire Web site.
- One assembly per content folder.
- A single assembly for all UI components.
- An assembly for each compiled file in the Web site.
- Assembly signing options.
- The ability to define custom pre-build and post-build actions.
- The ability to exclude folders from the build.
- The ability to modify settings in the Web.config file, such as the <connectionString> element, based on the Visual Studio build configuration.
- Support for creating .msi files with setup projects.
Tutorial
A tutorial on Web Deployment Projects can be found at Scottgu’s blog
It’s live and you can give it a try now! Ten minutes ago Shawn and Scott released the hounds. If you’d like to step through .NET Framework Source code, here’s what you need to do.
- Install this QFE.
- Note, if you’re on 64-bit Windows, read the description as there is a single manual step for 64-bit folks like me.
Go into Tools|Options|Debugging|General and turn off “Enable Just My Code” and turn on “Enable Source Server.” Go to Symbols and add this URL http://referencesource.microsoft.com/symbols and a local cache path. Make sure “search only when symbols are loaded manually” is checked.
Via .NET Framework Library Source Code available for viewing
Via Tip/Trick: Hard Drive Speed and Visual Studio Performance - ScottGu’s Blog
Two hard drive performance considerations to consider with desktop configurations:
1) Consider getting a 10,000rpm hard drive. These are lightening fast and can make a big difference over the default 7,200rpm drives that typically come with desktops (Jeff Atwood has a good blog post recommending one of these).
2) Consider buying a second physical hard drive and setup your operating system and OS virtual memory swap file to use one of the physical drives, and then store all your data (images, documents and Visual Studio projects) on the second physical drive. The benefit of an approach like this is that your read/write data operations won’t be competing for disk I/O activity with the operating system updating the virtual memory file.
While on the topic of improving Visual Studio performance, you might want to also check out the blog posts and articles below for some good recommendations:
In .NET 2.0+ and with the help of Visual Studio Generated Settings.settings, you can do the following:
Load your settings programmatically:
Settings set = Settings.Default;
Read from your settings:
string str = set.testSetting;
Write to your settings:
set.testSetting = “xyz”;
set.Save();
Very Easy
