Visual Studio - dotnet falcon

Adding your own help functionality to Visual Studio F1 Help

Jul 22, 2019

Not long ago a participant at a course of mine asked an interesting question. They were working on a project that used a .NET API extensively and they had developed their own set of internal documentation. The requirement was simple: you know the simple help feature of Visual Studio where

Visual Studio

Visual Studio extension to change the C# language version of a project

Akos Nagy

May 16, 2019

One of the courses that I teach is a workshop on the new features of the new C# language versions. During the course we look at the different language features of C# 6 and the newer versions. To illustrate the different features, I often change the language version of the

Entity Framework Code First generators templates

Akos Nagy

May 14, 2019

If you follow my blog, you know that one of the most prominently featured topics if Entity Framework. A not very-well known, but very useful feature of Entity Framework Code First is the ability to add your custom sql generators that are used when you create sql scripts from your

Updating my extensions for Visual Studio 2019

Akos Nagy

Apr 8, 2019

Last week, Visual Studio 2019 was finally released and with that, I think (I hope) most of us will switch to a new IDE with a lots of cool features. And with that in mind, I sat down and upgraded my extensions in the Visual Studio Marketplace to support the

Visual Studio

Visual Studio extension to manage your Github gists

Akos Nagy

Mar 20, 2019

There are a couple of extensions available in the Visual Studio Marketplace to handle your Github gists — and not to belittle others, but I have to admit, I didn't like any of them. They are not intuitive or comfortable to use or lack features. What I wanted was a complete,

Visual Studio

Countdown to C# 8: Visual Studio 2019 first impressions and non-nullable reference types

Akos Nagy

Mar 11, 2019

The launch of Visual Studio 2019 is upon us — and with the new IDE, we also get a new compiler for the newest version of our favorite programming language. There are already a lot of reviews and previews about the features that are available in the preview, but I decided

A Visual Studio extension to really clean your projects

Akos Nagy

Feb 25, 2019

During one of my C#-.NET courses, one of the participants was complaining how the "Clean solution" option of Visual Studio doesn't actually clean the solution. That is, it doesn't delete the bin and obj folders. And he was entirely right, and he was not alone with his frustration,

Dependency injection for Visual Studio extensions

Akos Nagy

Feb 14, 2019

Dependency injection is awesome. I have written a lot of posts that start the same way; mostly because dependency injection is awesome. I'm not going into the details of why (I have already done that in those posts), let's just assume I'm right :) When using dependency injection, there is a

Dependency Injection Toolset upgrade

Akos Nagy

Oct 1, 2018

I have a little tool in the VS Marketplace called Dependency Injection Toolset. The idea behind the tool was to help developers who apply dependency injection regularly by making it easier to code constructor injection. The original version of the tool basically did two things: * Could generate a constructor for

New extension in the marketplace: Linq standard query operators practice project template

Akos Nagy

Sep 27, 2018

As a teacher, I'm constantly faced with a frustrating challenge: eliminating boilerplate code from demos. If students have to type a lot of boilerplate code before starting a demo together or an exercise, valuable time is lost and they don't get the same knowledge — and since this is a service

Visual Studio item template for WCF Data Services

Akos Nagy

Jun 6, 2018

If you are only interested in downloading the packages, go to the marketplace. But if you want to know how it was made, read on ;) Back in the day we used WCF when it came to distributed software. Of course, the times have a-changed since and now in the pink

Dependency injection toolset upgrade

Akos Nagy

May 21, 2018

Dependency injection is probably the best thing in software development since slide bread. I often blog about related things and I also have a Visual Studio extension to help those who apply the principles in practice. Guard clauses in constructors An important piece of best-practice is that whenever you use

Visual Studio icon font

Akos Nagy

May 2, 2018

As you can probably see from my blog posts, I'm not really a front-end guy. If push comes to shove, I can manage some basic css, js and html but it's not really my thing. But sometimes, push does come to shove. As I was building the little promo website

Visual Studio

Code snippet for databound properties in MVVM

Akos Nagy

Apr 15, 2018

As you can read in the last couple of posts (like this, or this), I've been working with WPF for the last couple of weeks. Not very fun. I'm doing mostly the VMs and that involves a lot of property change notifications. We use the MVVMLight toolkit for basic MVVM

Implementing interface with auto properties

Akos Nagy

Nov 10, 2017

A cool feature in VS2017: when implementing an interface, you can now use auto properties. Here's what I'm talking about: let's say you have an interface, and you have properties in it. Something like this: public interface IInterface { int MyProperty { get; set; } } Then, you want to implement this interface in