Announcing Visual Studio “15” Preview 5

by bill-s, 2016-10-08T07:10:27.000Z

Today we released <a href="https://www.visualstudio.com/visual-studio-pre-release-downloads/">Visual Studio “15” Preview 5</a>. With this Preview, I want to focus mostly on performance improvements, and in the coming days we’ll have some follow-up posts about the performance gains we’ve seen. I’m also going to point out some of the productivity enhancements we’ve made.

How to add a 'Take Ownership' option to the right-click context menu

by bill-s, 2016-10-07T23:27:17.000Z

You can manually take ownership of these files, but if it's a thing you need to do on a regular basis so you can edit, rename, and delete as you see fit, there's an easier way that takes a bit of one-time work. With this Windows 10 guide we'll show you how to create a right-click context menu option to make it quick and easy to take ownership of a file.

Data Points - Run EF Core on Both .NET Framework and .NET Core

by bill-s, 2016-10-08T07:11:49.000Z

The technology formerly known as Entity Framework 7 (EF7) was renamed to Entity Framework Core (EF Core) in early 2016. EF Core 1.0.0 introduces some great new capabilities, though overall it does have a smaller feature set than EF6. But this doesn’t mean EF runs only on .NET Core. You can use EF Core in APIs and applications that require the full .NET Framework, as well as those that target only the cross-platform .NET Core. In this column, I’ll walk you through two projects that explore these options. My goal is to alleviate any worries the “Core” moniker might imply: that EF Core only runs on .NET Core. At the same time, I’ll explain the steps involved in creating each solution.

Parallel Test Execution

by bill-s, 2016-10-08T07:09:48.000Z

An <a href="https://johnkoerner.com/vs2015/parallel-test-execution-in-visual-studio-2015-update-1-might-not-be-what-you-expect/">early post</a> on Parallel Test Execution drew attention to its subtle semantics. Three considerations directly contributed to that <strong>(1)</strong> Reach <strong>(2)</strong>Composability <strong>(3)</strong> Non-disruptive roll out. The Visual Studio Test Platform is open and extensible, with tests written using various test frameworks and run using a <a href="https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/site/search?query=%22Test%20Adapter%22&amp;f%5B0%5D.Value=%22Test%20Adapter%22&amp;f%5B0%5D.Type=SearchText&amp;ac=4">variety of adapters</a>. To reduce on-boarding friction, the feature ought to work on existing test code. It especially needs to work on existing MSTest framework based test code – there is a huge corpus of such tests already written, and it would be unrealistic to expect users to go in and update their test code just to take advantage of the feature. The feature must acknowledge that adapters for frameworks like NUnit, and xUnit.net already enable parallel test execution.

Universal Windows Platform - Working with Memory Limits and Task Priorities in the UWP

by bill-s, 2016-10-08T07:08:45.000Z

Far more than any other app platform, the Universal Windows Platform (UWP) supports a vast range of background activities. If these were allowed to compete for resources in an uncontrolled manner, it would degrade the foreground experience to an unacceptable level. All concurrent processes compete for system resources—memory, CPU, GPU, disk and network I/O, and so on. The system Resource Manager encapsulates rules for arbitrating this contention, and the two most important mechanisms are memory limits and task priorities.

Visual Studio Toolbox: Using Git and GitHub

by bill-s, 2016-10-08T07:11:14.000Z

In <a href="https://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Visual-Studio-Toolbox/Using-Git-and-GitHub">this episode</a>, I am joined by <a href="https://twitter.com/codefoster">Jeremy Foster</a>, who just did a <a href="http://codefoster.com/githubmva">GitHub for Windows users course </a>for Microsoft Virtual Academy. Here, he focuses on how you can use GitHub in both Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code.