How C# and Visual Basic handle characters and single-character strings is a bit inconsistent. There's no tidy solution, but it's something you do need to know.
Here's a round-up of the most recently released extensions for Visual Studio. There's something here for everyone, from starting a new project to deploying your code.
- By Terrence Dorsey
- 08/17/2016
It's not quite there yet, but Visual Studio 2015 has improved the authentication process so that developers aren't forced to sign into it more than twice a day.
- By Michael Domingo
- 08/16/2016
By adding one open source library to your application (and adding two methods to your LINQ statements) you can cut the time spent on database updates and deletes in half.
As the end approaches for code-based sandbox support in SharePoint sites, Microsoft and third parties point to a few resources for inventorying sites that use it.
Recompiling source code while debugging is possible, but sometimes your C++ project might not be configured to use it.
- By Bartlomiej Filipek
- 08/11/2016
How can developers gain the trust of the operations side? As Microsoft's Donovan Brown explains in a Visual Studio Live! keynote, automation is key in gaining that trust. He then live-demoed a DevOps pipeline within an Azure environment to prove his point.
Developer evangelist James Montemagno explains the benefits that developers will derive in the coming months as a result of the company's acquisition by Microsoft earlier in the year (one hint: open source). He also doesn't hide his affinity for a certain mobile platform.
Vectors, lists, arrays, matrices and data frames -- a look at five of the most fundamental data structures built into R.
- By James McCaffrey
- 08/10/2016
At Visual Studio Live! on Tuesday, Microsoft's Amanda Silver offered up a state of the Microsoft development stack, noting the gains made by open sourcing its tools.
A release candidate for TFS '15' comes with UI changes on the Web side and a slew of improvements to Agile planning capabilities, Git, Build, and Release Management, to name a few (as well gobs of bug fixes).
- By Michael Domingo
- 08/09/2016
If you're looking for a lean, mean, cross-platform, desktop code editor then Visual Studio Code might be just your cup of tea. However, if you're used to the level of functionality you get with Visual Studio, it's important to set your expectations appropriately.
Integrating distributed, in-memory computing with distributed caching can easily extend LINQ semantics to create important new capabilities for real-time analytics on fast-changing data.
- By William L. Bain
- 08/08/2016
You can get lost looking for good .NET blogs among the several dozen good ones online right now. Here are three -- from Nick Chamberlain, Thomas Levesque, and Tony Sneed -- that are worthy of your attention right now.
Amanda Silver's opening keynote on the Open Microsoft Developer Platform, along with a slew of other selected developer sessions, will be live-streamed during next week's conference at the Microsoft campus.
- By Michael Domingo
- 08/04/2016
The .NET team has released a production-ready incremental update to .NET Framework that sports a number of improvements to the innerworkings of the Base Class Library, Common Language Runtime, and ClickOnce technology.
- By Michael Domingo
- 08/04/2016
Support for .NET Standard Libraries means Xamarin apps can share code among other .NET platforms, including .NET Core and ASP.NET Core.
Learn how Xamarin.Forms Behaviors and Effects make it easy to customize your apps in ways you can reuse them across all of your apps.
- By Greg Shackles
- 08/03/2016
With the release of Windows 10 Anniversary Update, there's now a version of the Universal Windows Platform app development tools for Visual Studio 2015 Update 3 that specifically targets it.
- By Michael Domingo
- 08/02/2016
The container technology company has made its tools that allow for streamlining the process of spinning up and managing Docker containers on Windows and Mac environments generally available.
- By Michael Domingo
- 08/02/2016