Steve Fenton

It is pretty common to clean up a project or solution to move the class files into a better organised folder structure. When you do this, the namespaces often end up reflecting their old location, not the better new location you moved them to. The task of manually updating the namespace and then fixing all […]

There is a really neat new feature in Visual Studio 2022, which is off by default. So, I thought I’d tell you about it to encourage you to switch it on. The feature will highlight variables that get reassigned by underlining them in the editor. When you enable this feature, variables that are assigned once […]

Either this is new, or it has been a long time since I last had to write a date out. Either way, I wanted to share the improvements I found had been made to Visual Studio when you decide to .ToString a date/time in your code. It’s a pretty common occurrence to write a message […]

Inspired by the short video by Mads Kristensen (part of a series conceived by Microsoft’s Misty Madonna)… I was inspired to update my Visual Studio layout for the first time in over ten years. What?! Ten years? Yes, for ten years I have installed Visual Studio, selected “Dark Theme”, and used it without adjustments. This […]

IntelliCode brings AI-assisted power-ups to your auto-completion. It has been in preview within Visual Studio for some time (you can read about Visual Studio IntelliCode here) – but it has now landed in Visual Studio Code, which is exceptionally handy if you’re a TypeScript programmer like me. So what is IntelliCode? It’s a simple VSCode […]

I have been writing C# code in Visual Studio since 2003. One of the big attractions of C# is the tooling. Visual Studio is awesome. Over the years I have worked in lots of IDEs and editors, but my go-to tools are Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code. I don’t know who writes these tools, […]

This is a quick note with an updated version on how to exclude files from the Visual Studio Code file explorer. I originally wrote about this in 2015 before the UI was as polished as it is now. I have also found I get asked about this a great deal due to conflicting information I […]

This is just a nod to the handy little Visual Studio Code Extension: Preview on Web Server. Now you can configure a task, or run a command, or set up a local web server yourself… but why not just install this extension and then just hit CTRL + SHIFT + L to load the web […]

SpecFlow is the defacto BDD tool for .NET programmers – and if you are using both SpecFlow and Visual Studio Team Services then this article is for you. There is a new VSTS extension called SpecFlow+LivingDoc that provides a simple build task that will generate documentation from your feature files. Here is a quick run-down […]

In the days of XAML Builds in TFS, the build would rather handily update the work item with the appropriate “Integration Build” value… so you knew which release would include your fix. Happy days. Along came vNext builds in TFS / Visual Studio Online / Visual Studio Team Services, which solved all of the pain […]