Visual studio 2012 is one of best IDE I have ever used. Everyday I am discovering something new with that IDE which is more productive. Today I have discovered “Closed All But Pinned” feature. I thought It’s a good idea to write a quick tip post.

Problem with Earlier Version:

Earlier we used to have “Close All But This” feature from Visual Studio 2008 which will close all the files except the that file. But what we should do If we need to have more than one file opened. There was not way for it in Visual Studio 2008.

So if we have requirement like above situation where we need to kept open more than one file. This features comes quite handy. You just have to pin files that you want it to be opened.

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With the release of ASP.Net 4.5 web forms there are tons of features added in the ASP.Net and Unobtrusive validations support is one of them. We have already seen that kind of validation in ASP.Net MVC and now we are going to have that in ASP.Net web forms. In this post I am going to explain how its works and how its different from earlier versions.

How validation was working with earlier versions?

In the earlier versions of ASP.Net it was working via putting a JavaScript for that. Let’s take a simple example. I have putted three things here. A textbox, required field validator and a button like following.

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We all are humans and we tends to make mistakes. I am personally take care about lots of spelling mistakes when writing code but sometimes we don’t identify whether there is a spelling mistake there or not. At that time this spell checker extensions come handy.There are plenty of options available for spell checker extensions but In this post I am going to explain those two free spell checker plugins that I am using.

Spell Checker by Noah Richards:

This is a excellent plugin for identifying the spelling mistakes. You can download plugin from following url.

http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/7c8341f1-ebac-40c8-92c2-476db8d523ce

It’s provides spelling checks for almost all the files.

1. Plain text files where entire file will be checked for incorrect spelling.
2. Source code(.cs files)
3. HTML/ASP files.

For each spelling error, the user is presented with a list of alternative spellings, via a smart tag (activate with ctrl+.), and the option to ignore the word or add it to the user's dictionary.

You can configure the color of the squiggle under misspelled words by changing the foreground color of Spelling Error (in Tools->Options->Environment->Fonts and Colors).  The default color is red. Following is a example for that.

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Right now everybody is talking about HTML5 and its contains lots of new features like web sockets, canvas, new intput types with validation etc.

ASP.NET 4.5 text mode property enhancement:

With HTML5 new input types is going to be one of coolest feature and in future more and more people are going to use that feature. So in asp.net 4.5 asp.net development team given a support via TextMode property enhancements.

In earlier versions of ASP.NET we used have only three properties for TextMode property of asp.net textbox control.

1. MultiLine- for multiline textbox.
2. Password- for password textbox
3. SignleLine –for single line textbox

With ASP.NET 4.5 you are going to have tons of options with TextMode property.

1. Color- for Color entries
2. Date-  for date entries. You can enter dates only
3. DateTime – for datetime entries with respect to local time zone.
4. DateTimeLocal- for datetime entries with respect to local time zone.
5. Email- for email address
6. Month- for month and year entry.
7. Number- for  entering numeric values.
8. Range- for containing range between two numbers.
9. Search- for search field. A search field is like regular text fields
10. Tel- for telephone number.
11. Url- for website url entries. It will only contain urls.
12. Week- for entering weeks and year.

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Today I came across a new feature of visual studio 2012 called Dependency Graph in visual studio 2012. I thought it will be good Idea to write a blog post about this.

I have written list of visual studio 2012 features post. You can find this at my Visual Studio 2012 page.

What is Dependency Graph?

Dependency graph help you visualize how your code is written and organized and provide view on code dependencies. This is very useful when you are working with a code that you have not written. With the dependency graph you can easily get an idea of code written by others in a application.

How to create Dependency Graph:

You can easily create dependency graph via architecture menu –>Generate Dependency graph. You will also presented to two options like below.

1. For Solution
2. For Include file.

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New version of ASP.NET provides lots of way of binding data to the data controls like Grid View, Repeater etc. You can now bind this controls with strong type. I have earlier written a blog post about How we can use Model binding with ASP.NET 4.5 and Visual Studio 2012.

SelectMethod in ASP.NET 4.5:

In asp.net 4.5, It is also possible to bind controls with SelectMethod attribute. This method specify the data that you want to bind with data controls like grid view and repeater controls.

So what we are waiting for?? Let’s take an simple example. I have create a basic model class “Employee” like below.

public class Employee
{
    public int EmployeeId { get; set; }
    public string FirstName { get; set; }
    public string LastName { get; set; }
}

This class contains three properties EmployeeId,FirstName and LastName. Now I have created one method to get a generic list of employee model like following.

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In this blog post we are going to learn about a new feature of Visual Studio 2012 called “Page Inspector”.

I have written  whole series about new features of Visual Studio 2012. This post will also be part of it. You can find all post related to Visual Studio at my Visual Studio 2012 page. Following is a link for that.

Visual Studio 2012 Feature Series

What is Page Inspector:

Page inspector is a great tool to inspect your page in Visual Studio itself. In other words, You can use Page Inspector as a browser and inspect your pages in Visual Studio itself. It’s really slow a common problem you can diagnose your page in visual studio itself. You can see where you UI comes from and even you can look into your page in HTML.

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I have created a video tutorial for Visual studio 2012. Where I have shown different kind of searching options.

Hope you like it. Stay tuned for more..

In this post I am going to explain about HTML Editor Enhancement in visual studio 2012. I have been writing few post about Visual studio 2012 new features and this post will also be part of that. You can read whole series at following link.

Visual Studio 2012 feature series

Tag highlighting in Visual Studio 2012:

In visual studio 2012 You can highlight the start and end tag of a particular HTML element. One you click on starting tag of HTML element it will have other part highlighted just like following.

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Recently before some time, Scott Gu announced ASP.NET and Web Tools 2012.2 Release Candidate. I have downloaded it and used it for a while and I have found following new things.

ASP.NET Enhancements:

• New facebook asp.net mvc template is  there. Creating facebook application with asp.net mvc become very easy. In just a few step you can easily create facebook application and get data of users and friends of facebook.
• Real Time Signal R support is there. You can easily create chat kind of applications with it. You can also take advantage of new web socket in .NET 4.5.
• New updates with ASP.NET WEB Api now supports OData, Integrated tracing and automatically generating help document for your api
• ASP.NET Friendly URLs: This feature makes developers life very easy with creating SEO friendly and cleaner looking URLs with out .aspx extension. The Friendly URLs feature also makes it easier for developers to add mobile support to their applications with support for mobile .ASPX pages and  supporting switching between desktop and mobile views.  It can be used with existing ASP.NET v4.0 applications
• Enhancement to Web publishing
• All new single page application template with knock out JavaScript library and restful UI.

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In this blog I am going explain how we are  going integrate Twitter Bootstrap library with ASP.Net MVC.

What is Twitter bootstrap:

Twitter Bootstrap is open source library created by Twitter. As per twitter it’s Sleek, intuitive, and powerful front-end framework for faster and easier web development. It’s full featured framework for creating web sites. It includes CSS framework, JavaScript, JavaScript plug-ins,typography, Html scaffolding. There are lots of themes also available that are available so you can use that right away.

Integrating Twitter bootstrap with ASP.Net MVC:

Earlier we have to manually integrate Twitter bootstrap into the ASP.NET MVC like here. But now We have Twitter.Bootstrap.MVC4 Nuget packages that saves lots of time to adding bootstrap to MVC4 template. It’s very easily combines bootstrap into ASP.NET MVC application thanks  to it’s authors Matt Hinze and Eric Hexter.

As per Eric Hexter It’s provide following features.

• JS and CSS bundling/minification of Twitter Bootstrap files the MVC4 way
• Incorporate a jQuery validation fix to work with the bootstrap javascript
• Razor Layout templates using Twitter Bootstrap markup.
• Menus using Navigation Routes, including submenus and hiding menus by context(logged in vs anonymous)
• Runtime Scaffolding – default Index, Edit and Detail views.. You provide thePOCOs and we will render the CRUDviews.
• Post Redirect Getsupport using the Bootstrap Alert styles.
• A Sample to show how to use all of this stuff

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This blog will be part of visual studio 2012 features series.

I personally like the Metro UI for Visual Studio 2102 but  still some people are not happy with it. They really like Old Visual Studio 2010 layout and they wanted to have same kind of color in visual studio 2012. For those who want to change the color of Visual studio there is a plug in called Visual Studio 2012 Color Theme editor. From which you can set colors for visual studio UI and make your visual studio look colorful. Following is a link for that.

http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/366ad100-0003-4c9a-81a8-337d4e7ace05

Once you download that from above location and click on installer it will ask for accepting terms and conditions like following.

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I have already written lots of post about Visual Studio 2012 features and this post is also going to be part of that series. You can get whole series of post from the following link.

Visual Studio 2012 features

In this post we are going to talk about search and filters provided into the visual studio 2012. There are lots of emphasis there in search and filters in visual studio 2012.You can almost search every thing including errors also. There are different search options are available for that.

Quick launch search in visual studio:

Prior to previous edition in visual studio 2012 there was quick launch search given at the top of the visual studio. From here you can search for anything in solutions and even menu’s also. It will provide you a quick launch for that.

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Few days back I was optimizing the performance with Entity framework and Linq queries and I was using LinqPad and looking SQL generated by the Linq or entity framework queries. After some point of time I got the same question in mind that how I can find the SQL Statement generated by Entity framework?

After some struggling I have managed to found the way of finding SQL Statement so I thought it would be a great idea to write a post about  same and share my knowledge about that. So in this post I will explain how to find SQL statements generated Entity framework queries.

To demonstrate the idea Let’s a very simple console application with C# and then  create a table called ‘Customer’ with CustomerId and CustomerName field in sql server.

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In c# 5.0 Microsoft has introduced a Caller information attribute. It’s a new feature that is introduced in C# 5.0 and very useful if you want to log your code activities. With the help of this you can implement the log functionality very easily. It can help any programmer in tracing, debugging and diagnostic of any application.
With the help of Caller Information we can get following information over there.

1. CallerFilePathAttribute: With help of  this attribute we can get full path of source file that contains caller. This will be file path from which contains caller at compile time.
2. CallerLineNumberAttribute:  With the help of this attribute we can get line number of source file which the method is called.
3. CallerMemberNameAttribute: With the help of this attribute we can get the method or property name of the caller.

Let’s write a simple example for that to see how its works. Following is a code for that.

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I have written whole series related to Visual Studio 2012 features and this post will also be part of same series.You can get all my post related to visual studio from the following link.

Visual Studio 2012 feature series

Before some days I was searching something and found a great way to change the visual experience of visual studio 2012. I found that there are two type of themes available in visual studio 2012 light and dark under Tools->Option-> General environment value. This is one of newest feature I have found in visual studio 2012.

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Visual studio is a Great IDE and there are still lots of feature that not known to developers. Incremental search is one of them. This is a amazing feature to find code in particular document and its available from Visual Studio 2010 and carried over in Visual Studio 2012. Incremental search allows developers to search in document without blocking UI and allow to search as they type.

Interesting!! right.. So let’s open visual studio and see how it works. Once you open Visual Studio and press Ctrl + I and type something it will find the string without blocking your visual studio UI. Just like following.

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I have written a whole series of Visual Studio 2012 features and this post will also be part of same series. You can get the whole list of blogs/articles from the Visual studio 2012 feature series posts there. Following is a link for that.

Visual Studio 2012 feature series

In earlier version of the asp.net we have to bind controls with data source control like SQL Data source, Entity Data Source, Linq Data Source if we want to bind our server controls declaratively. Some developers prefer to write whole data access logic and then bind the data source with databind method. Model binding is something similar to asp.net mvc binding.

Model Binding in ASP.NET 4.5 and Visual Studio 2012:

With ASP.NET 4.5 and Visual studio 2012 we have a new method of binding data called ‘ Model binding’. It’s a code focus approach of data binding. Now all the controls will have ItemType property which will implement strongly type binding. The server controls will then call appropriate methods at the proper time in page life cycle and bind the data.

So what we are waiting for ? let’s take one example. First we need to create a model. For the this I have created a model class called ‘Customer’. Following is code for that.

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I have been writing lots of things about Visual Studio 2012 and this post is same in the series. You can find complete list of post from the following link.

Visual Studio 2012 feature series- What’s new in Visual Studio 2012.

Visual studio 2012 is there in RC stage and I am exploring that into the great extent. Visual Studio 2012 is great editor there is no doubt. It is much more mature and comes with lots of features. Telerik – A well know in third party controls released a free eBook on Visual Studio 2012 and ASP.NET 4.5. You can find lots of time saving feature documented in this eBook.



Following is a quick list of features they have explored in Visual Studio 2012.

1. JavaScript Intellisense
2. CSS Intellisense
3. ASP.NET and ASP.NET Web API
4. Strongly typed data binding
5. Page Inspector(new Debugging Tool)
6. HTML5 and CSS3 is available out of box
7. Request validation prevents yellow screen of death
8. WAI Aria makes the web usable by all

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This post will be a part of Visual Studio 2012 feature series.

There are lots of new features there in visual studio 2012. Event handler generation is one of them. In earlier version of visual studio there was no way to create event handler from source view directly.  Now visual studio 2012 have event handler generation functionality.

So if you are editing an event view in source view intellisense will display add new event handler template and once you click on it. It will create a new event handler in the cs file. It will also put a eventhandler name against event name so you don’t need to write that.

So, let’s take a simple example of button click event so once I write onclick attribute their smart intellisense will pop up
.


Now once you click on <Create New Event> It will create event handler in .cs file like following.

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