VS2010 and MSBuild don’t provide a good way to deploy windows apps using continuous integration (especially to different environments). Over the past couple days I’ve wasted a lot of time manually deploying my apps to test them on dev. Brian Gansemer has talked about creating hooks for deploying ClickOnce apps as part of the build process, but I wanted to keep my apps as regular console apps. Here is the solution I came up with to automatically deploy my project. More...

Our first group blog post! Here are some of the DPL team's favorite shortcuts for saving time in Visual Studio 2010. Hopefully you'll find these as useful as we do. Note that these work when you're using the standard C#.NET keyboard layout, which is the same as "DEFAULT" in the Keyboard options. More...

Have you ever wondered if your custom data access code is any more efficient than simply loading a DataTable? Not that I'd recommend using DataTables except for certain situations, but Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate makes it easy to load test your data access classes to determine performance. More...

When manually writing Plain Old CLR Objects (POCOs) (that is, not using the T4 template mechanism), you’ll be left with not only replicating the structure of the table itself in the object layout, but also any objects associated with said structure (foreign keys). More...

​Below is an example of how I like to use properties to access HTML items from code-behind.  It allows you to have strongly-typed objects and a single point of access to HTML items. More...

This post introduces Microsoft's Feature Builder Power Tool (Feature Builder) and describes its major components. More...

Recently we’ve received a couple comments on my blog post ClickOnce Publish and Deploy from Team Foundation Server 2010 so I thought we should do a follow-up post to share what we’ve learned. More...

Let's talk shelving.  Not the kind you try to build in your garage that never fits together, and not a bunch of milk cartons stacked on each other. I'm talking about source control shelvesets.  Think of them as a snapshot of your local workspace at a given time. We use them a lot in many different projects. MSDN has a nice article about their usefulness here. More...

Microsoft allows you to single-step through the framework code via Visual Studio 2008/10. To enable this under 2010 is trivial. More...

Overview

ClickOnce technology is a very powerful way to distribute your applications to end users. It is especially nice for easily distributing updates to your application. Even if you don't plan to distribute your application using ClickOnce technology, it is still a great tool for deploying daily updates for QA during development. More...