This is the twenty-sixth in a series of blog posts I’m doing on the VS 2010 and .NET 4 release.
Today’s blog post covers some useful debugging tips that you can use with Visual Studio. My friend Scott Cate (who has blogged dozens of great VS tips and tricks here) recently highlighted these to me as good tips that most developers using Visual Studio don’t seem to know about (even though most have been in the product for awhile). Hopefully this post will help you discover them if you aren’t already taking advantage of them. They are all easy to learn, and can help save you a bunch of time.
Run to Cursor (Ctrl + F10)
Often I see people debugging applications by hitting a breakpoint early in their application, and then repeatedly using F10/F11 to step through their code until they reach the actual location they really want to investigate. In some cases they are carefully observing each statement they step over along the way (in which case using F10/F11 makes sense). Often, though, people are just trying to quickly advance to the line of code they really care about – in which case using F10/F11 isn’t the best way to do this.
Instead, you might want to take advantage of the “run to cursor” feature that the debugger supports. Simply position your cursor on the line in your code that you want to run the application to, and then press the Ctrl + F10 keys together. This will run the application to that line location and then break into the debugger – saving you from having to make multiple F10/F11 keystrokes to get there. This works even if the line of code you want to run to is in a separate method or class from the one you are currently debugging.
Conditional Breakpoints
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The Open Graph protocol enables any web page to become a
rich object in a social graph. For instance, this is used on Facebook to allow
any web page to have the same functionality as any other object on Facebook.
While many different technologies and schemas exist and could be combined
together, there isn't a single technology which provides enough information to
richly represent any web page within the social graph. The Open Graph protocol
builds on these existing technologies and gives developers one thing to
implement. Developer simplicity is a key goal of the Open Graph protocol which
has informed many of
the technical design decisions.
To turn your web pages into graph objects, you need to add basic metadata to
your page. We've based the initial version of the protocol on
RDFa which means that you'll place
additional <meta> tags in the <head> of your web page. The four required
properties for every page are:
<meta><head>
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We'll help you get online products designed better and faster than ever before and set you up for future iterations.
Foundation
We developed the most advanced responsive front-end framework in the world and made it free-for-all.
ZURBapps
A powerful design suite that will help you prototype, iterate and collect feedback on your product design.
Expo
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Here you will find useful resources for Java based open source projects. We categorize resources based on type. All of our articles include links to discussed technologies, tools and architectures. The Resources page is an index, a quick reference point for all of you who would like to get their hands right on what Java Code Geeks are working on!
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Everyone collects utilities, and most folks have a list of a few that they feel are indispensable. Here's mine. Each has a distinct purpose, and I probably touch each at least a few times a week. For me, "util" means utilitarian and it means don't clutter my tray. If it saves me time, and seamlessly integrates with my life, it's the bomb. Many/most are free some aren't. Those that aren't free are very likely worth your 30-day trial, and perhaps your money.
Here are most of the contents of my C:\UTILS folder. These are all well loved and used. I wouldn't recommend them if I didn't use them constantly. Things on this list are here because I dig them. No one paid money to be on this list and no money is accepted to be on this list.
Personal Plug: Discover more cool tools and programming tips on my weekly Podcast Hanselminutes, or my other show with Rob Conery called This Developer's Life.
This is the Updated for 2011 Version of my 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2009 List, and currently subsumes all my other lists. Link to http://hanselman.com/tools when referencing the latest Hanselman Ultimate Tools List. Feel free to get involved here in the comments, post corrections, or suggestions for future submissions. I very likely made mistakes, and probably forgot a few utilities that I use often.
NOTE: Please don't reproduce this in its entirety, I'd rather you link to http://hanselman.com/tools. I appreciate your enthusiasm, but posts like this take a lot of work on my part and I'd appreciate that work staying where it is and linked to, rather than being copy/pasted around the 'net. If you're reading this content and you're not at http://hanselman.com, perhaps you'd like to join us at the original URL?
The Big Ten Life and Work-Changing Utilities
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Sarah currently works as a writer for TechCrunch, after having previously spent over three years at ReadWriteWeb. Prior to becoming a professional blogger, Sarah worked in I.T. across a number of industries, including banking, retail and software. → Learn More
Foursquare recently announced it has grown to 33 million users, but another, albeit older, location-based app called Life360 just crossed a milestone of its own: 34 million users. Yes, this family locator utility is now bigger than Foursquare – at least in terms of registered users. To be fair, the companies don’t disclose their actives.
Life360 is not what you would call an overnight success story. It was launched all the way back in 2008, Android first, before people were perhaps as comfortable with sharing their location as they are today. Its core use case involving family location tracking has slowly grown more relevant over the years, especially as more children and teens adopt smartphones. In fact, according to a recent report from Pew Internet, 37 percent of U.S. teens now own smartphones.
There are a number of applications busying themselves in the family locator or check-in space outside of Foursquare, of course. Both Apple and Google offer half-hearted efforts with apps like Find My Friends and Latitude, specifically. Others focus primarily on one aspect of family messaging – like the “panic button” apps that alert a network when a family member is in trouble. And more recent entrants like Hubble believe there’s room for apps focused mainly on private family networking.
But Life360 CEO Chris Hulls thinks that the real potential for family connectivity outside of Facebook lies not in building smaller, more private, social networks, but rather with utility.
“There’s there’s interesting bias that whoever’s going to win family is going to look like Facebook but with a smaller group,” he says. “But maybe whoever wins family is just going to be doing things that’s so different from what’s out there today, that’s what’s going to make them take off.”
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Windows Azure has seen a lot of growth over the last year. Microsoft is either adding completely new services, or updating existing features, every few months. Two of the most impactful recent Windows Azure platform updates were announced in June 2012 with Windows Azure Web Sites and Windows Azure Virtual Machines. Developers can start creating applications for free with a Windows Azure Web Site, evolve into a more robust Cloud Service, and potentially take the leap to leverage a customized Virtual Machine. When combining Web Sites and Virtual Machines with the rich features already available in Cloud Services, the Windows Azure platform offers application owners, developers, and architects the flexibility and breadth of choices that not many other cloud platforms can offer.
The Prerequisites
If you don’t already have a Windows Azure account, you can sign up for a free 90-day trial account. You will need a credit card – this is to prove you’re a human and allows you the option to easily extend your usage beyond what is available in the trial. Alternatively, if you have MSDN, or are a BizSpark or WebsiteSpark member, then you already have Windows Azure benefits as part of your member benefits (more details here). Once the account is created, or if one already exists, activate the Windows Azure Web Site and Virtual Machines preview features. Windows Azure Web Sites and Virtual Machines are at the time of this writing still in a “preview” mode – meaning Microsoft is still adjusting features, pricing, stability, etc. (“preview” has essentially replaced “beta”). All Windows Azure preview features (Web Sites, Virtual Machines, Media Services, and Mobile Services), can be activated by going to the Windows Azure preview features activation page (sign-in with your Microsoft Account / Live ID). Then simply activate the desired features by pressing the “try it now” button.
Starting with a Windows Azure Web Site
Windows Azure Web Sites (WAWS) provide a free, fast, and flexible option for hosting web applications with Windows Azure. WAWS supports “Classic” ASP, ASP.NET, PHP, node.js, and Python – great for application developers that use the Microsoft stack, or those that don’t. One of the main attractions of WAWS is the speed with which new web solutions can be developed and deployed. WAWS allows developers to get started for free and scale out, or up, as their application needs grow. As more resources are used, you start to pay a fee to use those resources.
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This is nice tool and make TFS funtions easier..
I tested the backup tool feature, and it worked perfectly. Very handy tool.
dose not work in vs 2012 rc, work with vs 2010 but can not edit Microsoft Visual Studio Scrum 2.0 - Preview 4
It is very nice being able to edit XAML within the build process templates. This should be a common tool within Visual Studio. Thanks for doing this.
Don't know why I cannot view the 78 reviews that others have written. Microsoft - get with the "app" process - we all expect to see other reviews before we buy a product...
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