A cool feature in Visual Studio 2010 is Pin To Source. This command is available in the Visual Studio code editor context menu and allows you to create a kind of little “Post-It!” on your code showing variable values and expressions that you want to watch during a debugging session. Its very handy:

Just right click on the variable you wish to watch (or create your own expression) and select Pin To Source. And Voilá! A tip shows up with the current inspected value. When you aren’t debugging it all becomes grayed out, just like the Watch window.

I’m having a blast with this tiny feature. But use it wisely and if you see yourself creating huge “post-it” farms, you’ll maybe want to consider calling it a day!

EDIT: Visual Studio 2010 RC has some issues with this feature though. Pinned variables/expressions get a marking on the left bar of the code editor (where debug markers stay) with a pin icon. In design time you can see their latest values and you also have the options to clear them and arrange them. When doing the later, VS 2010 crashes in all its glory… Another one to get in the bug fixing line to the final release.

And that’s a rap. The 2010’s Most valuable Professional Summit is now over. It took place in Bellevue & Redmond, Washington, and for those who couldn’t be there for all the good stuff in the agenda, well, eyes wide open for blogs, tweets and streams.

In the meantime, get yourself on the run for that distinguished MVP title and get your ticket to next year’s summit as well as your trophy-kit. The girls will love it… I guess )

Next, on April 12th, Microsoft will be pairing with DevConnections for the Visual Studio Launch at the Bellagio Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, NV. Microsoft will launch Visual Studio 2010, and by attending the Microsoft Visual Studio Conference & Expo, you will not only experience the launch alongside the Visual Studio team and industry legends – you’ll get three days of sessions by the best speakers in the industry on the latest and greatest technologies, such as WPF, Silverlight and .NET 4.0.  Also, If you attend Microsoft Visual Studio Conference & Expo, you’ll automatically get access to both the ASP.NET and Silverlight and the SQL Conference and Expo.

I’m at it again. Yesterday when working on a simplistic WPF form for a user profile configuration scenario, Visual Studio did it again with a bang, crashing in all it’s glory when switching to designer view.

What solved the problem? Well… Erasing the solution .suo file so that the IDE doesn’t crash on startup if, by any chance, a xaml document is open in design view, and installing the following hotfix made available by Microsoft:

KB963035 – VS2008 SP1 sometimes hangs irretrievably after WPF Designer

This hotfix relates to the Visual Studio IDE hanging, not crashing. But nevertheless It can be a valuable contribution to solving the problem.

Cleaning the solution also solved the problem in some cases, from what I’ve read and heard.

Well, I’ve heard of this bug before, but never had the unfortunate displeasure of experiencing it. Two days ago I started having problems when opening my Shell.xaml file, on a CWPF-based solution (hence the name, by the way). When I dbl clicked the xaml file, the split designer/xaml tab showed up, started loading the designer part (the usual message appears – “Press ESC to cancel”) and suddenly, VS closed silently, discarding any changes I’ve made that far… Pretty neat huh? This has never happened to me before, and this xaml file had no special code written on it. In fact, as the name implies, it is just a shell for other views to use as canvas:

<Window x:Class="Client.Shell"
	xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
	xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
	xmlns:cal="http://www.codeplex.com/CompositeWPF"
	xmlns:infra="clr-namespace:Client.Infrastructure;assembly=Client.Infrastructure" Title=Test Height="600" Width="1024" WindowState="Maximized">
	<Grid VerticalAlignment="Stretch" HorizontalAlignment="Stretch" Background="LemonChiffon">
		<ItemsControl VerticalAlignment="Stretch" HorizontalAlignment="Stretch" cal:RegionManager.RegionName="{x:Static infra:RegionNames.AppRegion}" Background="Azure" />
	<Grid>
<Window>

I’ve read one workaround to this, wich was to create a new control or window. Well… The results were disapointing. Creating a new usercontrol or window also infamously crashed my Visual Studio. I started to get really pissed at this. It is really frustrating to work in these conditions.. One thing I’ve tried was to create a user control in another project in the solution, and in this test, everything went normally. Testing this again on the original project, problem remained. So, this is a local project symptom.

I started to wonder what this file had that was so special (or hated) to VS, for it to close so desperately! So I noticed the App.xaml, just sitting there so confortably for so long, and wondered what would happen if I opened it, since it isn’t a visual file and only has Xaml. After clicking it, the xaml appeared in a hurry, no problem there. Then I immediately tested opening my Shell.xaml file again, hoping some internal refresh was made, and, to my surprise, it worked! From that point on, I had no more problems whatsoever.

Let this be a lesson to everyone who experienced this. Still haven’t come up with a reasonable diagnostic to this, but I’ll keep you posted af anything new comes up.

Accoording to Scott Guthrie, Microsoft has decided to bundle jQuery with the next releases of Visual Studio. From what I’ve read (and already tested) from jQuery, this will be great and handy. Instead of reinventing the weel and create something similar within AJAX, MS decided to support this API nd take advantage of an already large community extremely dedicated to jQuery.

Although I haven’t had any serious experimentation with jQuery, thorough investigation is definitely on my todo list. jQuery allows you to control and manipulate HTML elements with ease, with few lines of code. It has an API that allows developers to find/query HTML elements, and apply commands to them.