Visual Studio

JSON and XML to C# classes in Visual Studio

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Although this feature is available for years in Visual Studio, I only recently discovered this gem that allows rapid generation of C# classes from either JSON or XML.

Here is how it works:

  1. Copy the JSON or XML code to the clipboard.
  2. In Visual Studio, go to Edit > Past Special and chose either Paste JSON as classes or Paste XML as classes.

Unit testing non-public types and members for .NET projects

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Unit testing is usually used for testing public types and members. However, there are cases when you might need to test types or members that are not public. These could be internal classes or private helper methods, for instance. Whether that is proper unit testing or beyond its scope is not a discussion that I want to get into here. However, in this post, I will show how you can unit test non-public types and members from .NET assemblies.

When faced with the need for testing non-public types and members you can use several approaches:

  • change the accessibility to public; you can do that perhaps only for debug builds and keep the intended accessibility in release builds by using conditional compilation.
  • provide public members of a class that invoke private ones;
  • use reflection.

The first solutions involve changing the API only for the sake of the testing. The last solution avoids that but requires more work. To help with that, the Visual Studio unit testing framework provides some helper types that enable you to focus on the actual testing and be less concerned about the reflection details.

Troubles with Windows SDK

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I recently installed a fresh copy of Visual Studio 2017 on a new machine and went on to build several projects some of them being VC++. The trouble was that I immediately run into a problem (actually the first problem was that MFC & ATL were missing because I forgot to check that in the list of Individual components so I had to install them separately). The problem was an error with a missing new.h header:

1>c:\program files (x86)\microsoft visual studio\2017\enterprise\vc\tools\msvc\14.15.26726\atlmfc\include\afx.h(62): fatal error C1083: Cannot open include file: 'new.h': No such file or directory

Changing the color schemes of your development tools

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The tools I use the most as a developer include the command prompt, notepad, Visual Studio, and Total Commander. The trouble is, I don’t really like the default colors they come with. However, some of them can be customized with different color schemes. Some very popular color schemes are Solarized and OneHalf, both having a light and a dark version. In this article, I will show how to enable Solarized for them.

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Update a TFS team project manually to support code reviews

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If you are working with TFS and have projects created in older versions you might want to use features available in newer versions of TFS (given that you have updated to such a newer version). These features could be code reviews, feedback, my work, storyboarding, and others. In this post, I will explain how to manually modify the team project settings to enable code review. You can only do this is you have proper access rights.

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