Visual Studio on ZeroSharp

A strange error message from Visual Studio 2015

Mon, 03 Aug 2015 15:35:00 +0100

When I recently upgraded to Visual Studio 2015, everything seemed to go very smoothly except that whenever I debugged my main application I got a dialog window with the following strange error:

The procedure entry point could not be located in the dynamic link library C:\...\bin\Debug\netutils.dll.

After pressing OK everything seemed to work as normal.

After a considerable number of dead ends, I finally worked out that changing the name of the NetUtils.dll assembly fixes the problem. It seems that Visual Studio 2015 gets confused with a Windows system assembly with the same name. I don’t know why it was never a problem with Visual Studio 2013, but I renamed the assembly and now everything is working fine.

Fixing slow debugging of ASP.NET applications

Wed, 03 Jun 2015 21:31:00 +0100

For a while I’ve noticed an annoying slowness when debugging ASP.NET applications from Visual Studio. Just after every page load it takes about a second before the buttons become clickable. I noticed mostly when debugging XAF applications, perhaps because the pages are quite complex.

Turns out the culprit is something called Browser Link which was introduced in Visual Studio 2013. It’s enabled by default.

To turn it off you can turn it off from the menu:

Provisioning a new development machine with BoxStarter

Tue, 25 Feb 2014 15:29:00 +0100

I’ve been playing around with Boxstarter to configure my entire development environment with hardly any user intervention.

Here are the steps:

Install Windows 8.1 on a new machine.
Login.
Open a command prompt and enter the following.

START http://boxstarter.org/package/nr/url?http://bit.ly/1kapDXI

That’s it!

Boxstarter will self-install via ClickOnce, asking for various confirmations and ultimately it will prompt you for your login password. (This gets saved and encrypted to allow for unattended reboots and re-logins during the installation). Then the real magic begins. Boxstarter downloads and installs all your tools and configures your environment, rebooting as necessary. An hour later your full development setup is installed, including Visual Studio 2013, any VS extensions, any other programs and tools, all the browsers you need, all critical Windows updates, etc. You just saved yourself a couple of days of work and a lot of hassle.