Scott Hanselman

There are some amazing free and open source C# and VB.NET analyzers and refactorings that you can download and use now in Visual Studio 2015. Formerly called "NR6Pack" they have now be renamed VS Refactoring Essentials, a nice nod to VSWebEssentials I must say.

The best part, of course, is that since the Visual Studio Community Edition is not only FREE but also now supports extensions, that any open source or indie developer can get pack some serious power into their Visual Studio installations.

There's some interesting history here as the project and its core technology has been around for a while. It's moved from SharpDevelop into NRefactory, then NRPack, and now with the major Roslyn refactor by Mike Krüger, you've got a nice Roslyn code-base and a free extension for all called VS Refactoring Essentials.

There's lots of great refactorings, too many to include screenshots for all of them, but here's a few favorites.

Sometimes you'll dig deep into a dictionary without being defensive. VS Refactoring Essentials will notice and check the dictionary key first. Note that you'll always get a preview of what it's going to change first!

Conditionals can sometimes get away from you. VS Refactoring Essentials will simplify common conditionals and make them easier to read.

When setting boolean flags you'll sometimes set it, check something, and update that same flag. This refactoring will notice that and do it all on one line for you.

I never get ?: and ?? correct. VS Refactoring Essentials will help you move between ternary operators and null coalescing.

FYI - This is a purely open source project that is not affiliated with Microsoft. It's part of the SharpDevelop OSS project and is MIT-licensed. Big thanks to the SharpDevelop team!

NOTE: Visual Studio 2015 will launch on July 20th. Be sure to download Visual Studio 2015 Community on that date. Until then, the V2015RC of Community is here.

Be sure to follow @VSRefactoring on twitter and thanks for them for their hard work and community focus! Go download Refactoring Essentials here for VS2015. Report issues on their GitHub.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

About   Newsletter

Hosting By

Windows 10 is coming on July 29th! I've been doing Build to Build videos on my YouTube showing what's changing and how it will affect you.

I got a request to do a video showing Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 10 and how to reserve your upgrade, as well as a little demo of the Start Screen. Here's that video!

NOTE: I apologize for the mediocre audio. I had a microphone failure and ended up using the laptop microphone for the last part because I was excited to get the video out. It's not representative of the quality I'm known for, and it won't happen again.

Are you the IT manager for your extended family? Will you be upgrading non-technical parent to Windows 10 or letting them do it themselves? Sound off in the comments below.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

About   Newsletter

Hosting By

This blog post is likely not for you, unless it totally is. Which is why I'm posting it.

My Dad's Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro was driving him batty for months. It was bugging me even more, as I am the assigned IT manager for my family. I'm sure you are also, as you're reading this blog, right?

Anyway, I talk this computer up for months, he gets the computer, and it has this tiny Micro-HDMI connector.

Let me just say that Micro-HDMI is the most evil of all display connectors. I mean, it literally does everything wrong.

Micro-HDMI sucks because:

• Micro-HDMI looks like Micro USB and I can't explain to my Dad that they are different.
• Micro-HDMI is the most fragile of all ports. If you blow on it you'll lose signal.
• It's like the tiny shorty soda pop can of Tab. It's not Diet Coke. It's not enough. It's useless.

Which brings me to the point. His didn't work. Never worked. I tried new drivers, flashing BIOS, new cables, jiggling the connector, everything.

Except the obvious - cutting up the cable.

It turns out that many cables (especially cheap ones from Amazon) don't expose enough metal to make a decent connection.

Take a razor blade and cut a good millimeter around the cable's rubber housing to expose more metal.

Boom. It works immediately. Dad's thrilled. I'm a good son again and Micro-HDMI continues to suck as a display connector.

Full-sized HDMI or Mini-DP (Display Port) from now on, my friends.

Please, regale me in the comments with tales of why YOU too hate Micro-HDMI, Dear Reader.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

About   Newsletter

Hosting By

I was chatting with Phil Haack today about a weird little bug/feature we were seeing in GitHub for Windows. I don't have the source code for the application, but I wanted to explore what was going on and get some insight so I could give Phil a decent bug report.

He and I spent some time on Skype sharing screens today and he commented "we should be recording this." So I went back and did just that.

Please take a moment and Subscribe to my YouTube Channel here: http://youtube.com/shanselman

In this short video I remind folks how Procmon and ProcExp work, how powerful they are and I learn some interesting things about GitHub for Windows!

Let me know if you find short videos like these useful, and if you do, suggest topics in the comments!

Also, a reminder, if you've got non-technical family or friends who want help with Windows 8, give them a YouTube Playlist designed just for them! http://hanselman.com/windows8

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

About   Newsletter

Hosting By

I've been working with Visual Studio 2015 lately, even for older projects. You can create and edit all kids of .NET app from .NET 2.0 all the way up through .NET 4.6, as well as ASP.NET 5 apps on the Core CLR.

In my case I've been doing some pair programming with Mark Downie on DasBlog, the blog system that runs this blog right here. DasBlog is very old, and used to be very actively developed. The question "is DasBlog dead" is asked a lot, but the answer is really "DasBlog is done." For years it has been very feature-full and feature-complete. However, this blog has been running on .NET 2.0 for years. Mark and I thought it would be nice to upgrade DasBlog to .NET 4.6, so we did. We've also moved DasBlog over to GitHub. You'll find it at http://github.com/shanselman/dasblog.

Now, to be clear, DasBlog was amazing in 2004 and 2008 but it's aging now. Mark and I think that's the fun of it, though. Mark's added Twitter Card and Facebook Open Graph support, and together we've fixed a few oddities and bugs that have popped up in the leap from 2.0 to 4.6. However DasBlog remains idiomatic .NET 2.0 which means it's C# 2.0, and doesn't even make good use of Linq or generics. We're thinking about a few updates, moving the Templating system to RazorEngine, updating to Linq queries, smarter threading for collections, better caching, as well of Mark's ideas around social.

You might think it's weird to use Visual Studio 2015 to work with a .NET 2.0 app, but it's useful to remember that you get to use new Visual Studio features even with older frameworks. One of the most useful new features is the Diagnostic Tools toolbox. It's a boring name for an amazing new part of VS. I'm not sure what they could call it other than Diagnostic Tools, but it's insanely convenient.

Often we think of Debugging and Profiling as two separate activities, and honestly, I talk to developers all the time that have never Profiled an app. They know that Profiling exists as a tool and a concept, but for whatever reason they forget about it, don't get around to it, or haven't adopted it as a fundamental part of their daily workflow.

The Diagnostic Tools in Visual Studio 2015 bring in data from a number of sources, Breakpoints, the Debugger, Tracing and Debug out, as well as Intellitrace Events and Historical Debugging (on supported SKUs).

Notice in the screenshot above, I can even see a little tip showing how many milliseconds has elapsed between two breakpoints. It's little features like this that take data that has long been available but not in front of your face. Why dig for it?

I can even go back in time with Historical Debugging. See how I can backup and see the state of Local Variables and the Call Stack when I'm at a Breakpoint?

If you have a SKU with IntelliTrace, you can get extra info if you'd like to enable Historical Debugging.

See how I've got Memory and CPU graphs, and I didn't have to do anything? This pops up automatically when Debugging:

I can take Memory Snapshots, go to the next Breakpoint, take another and compare!

If you've got Visual Studio 2015 and haven't started using these tools, I'd suggest you start exploring. They're useful enough that they've got me using VS2015 RC for all my projects, even older .NET 2.0 ones.

NOTE: Remember that Visual Studio Community is free for Open Source projects, and supports extensions! http://www.visualstudio.com/free

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

About   Newsletter

Hosting By