Tools

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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A tale of Visual Studio and SQL Server Compact

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I have recently upgraded my SSD disk to a newer and larger one. To avoid the hassle of re-installing everything (I have a lot of things to install) I cloned the disk. Everything worked fine. No problems with the operating system and the applications, except for Visual Studio. Though I could start, edit, build, run, … Read more

Per-project natvis files in Visual Studio “14”

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Visual Studio 2012 introduced a new framework for writing debugger visualizers for C++ types that replaced the old autoexp.dat file. The new framework offers xml syntax, better diagnostics, versioning and multiple file support. Visualizers are defined in XML files with extension .natvis. These visualizers are loaded each time the debugger starts. That means if you … Read more

Visual Studio 2013 User Profile

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Visual Studio 2013 provides developers with the ability to sign in with a Microsoft account and synchronize settings across devices (and as new versions will be released across different versions of Visual Studio). When you first launch Visual Studio 2013 you are asked to sign in (you can skip that and do it any time … Read more

How to Determine What Process Loaded a DLL

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Trying to figure out in which process a particular DLL is currently loaded, I have found two solutions (perhaps there are more). Solution 1: tasklist.exe tasklist /m <modulename>.dll Solution 2: listdlls.exe (from sysinternals) listdlls -d <modulename>.dll It might be that listdlls is more reliable than tasklist. I have ran into cases when tasklist failed to … Read more

Missing 64-bit compiler and tools

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Let’s say you have this VC++ project (or maybe more) targeting a 64-bit platform (x64 or IA64). You have the sources, everything is set. You build the solution and your project is skipped. You try again, maybe do a rebuild. The project is still skipped. You check the solution’s configuration manager, and the project is … Read more