Steve Fenton

If you find yourself constantly opening Source Control Explorer, you may want to use this handy shortcut to opening Visual Studio with the Source Control Explorer open, instead of the Start Page. Open the properties for your Visual Studio shortcut and change this: “C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe” And change it by adding the […]

UPDATE: Derrick Fu, the VSTS Program Manager has sent a quick update and it looks like this one is on the radar for the VSTS team: “This is a known issue when transitioning from a custom state to Closed. We have plans to address this with our next iteration of states customization. You can keep […]

Visual Studio Team Services recently got custom states for work items. The simplest way to use this new feature is to create a custom state for each column on your Kanban board (previously, tasks had to be “Committed” all the way through the board). This feature makes it even easier to set up custom alerts […]

TL;DR: This is caused by adding a parent/child relationship between two cards. We are using the new Kanban boards in Visual Studio Team Services (formerly known as Visual Studio Online, but this would also apply to on-prem TFS too). A month ago, another team member noticed a card had disappeared from the board. It seemed […]

Update! As of February 2016, you should be able to use the standard “NuGet Installer” vNext build task. The new way Add the Nuget Installer build task, which can be found under “Add build step” -> “Package”. You will need to supply a NuGet.config file with the address of your custom feed: <?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”utf-8″?> […]

With the imminent arrival of Visual Studio Online Package Manager, which lets us host NuGet (and other) packages on our Visual Studio Online account, it is almost certain that you are going to lose the plot when managing NuGet packages in Visual Studio and keep getting prompted for your account details (especially as the “Remember […]

Update! As of February 2016, you can now use the ready-made vNext NuGet Publisher step to do this and it is even easier. The new way Add a new vNext build step using “Add build step…” -> Package -> NuGet Publisher. Select “Internal NuGet Feed” and paste in your feed url – job done. With […]

Visual Studio Team Services is rather good, but if you are using it outside of the USA you’ll be fighting the date format, which displays in the month-day-year format. The recommended fix for this used to be to set your preferences to pick up the date format from the browser, but for some reason this […]

If you are using Entity Framework and you want to test your application without the real database, the typical technique employed is to write a repository or query provider that you can substitute with a stub during the test. Sometimes, though, you are better off pushing things a couple of levels deeper. This is where […]

I had an annoying issue in Visual Studio 2015 whereby the views lost all intellisense. Errors such as “The name model does not exist” and lack of assitance with HTML Helper methods were accompanied by red squiggly lines. Most of the advice for fixing this is based on the assumption that the views are broken […]