Developing Dane

Update 10/2016 - This posting is better viewed in my new blog . I'm a HUGE fan of Visual Studio. In my opinion it is the best IDE available by a wide margin. I've been a heavy user of every version since VS2003 and I dabbled in several previous to that. I've anxiously awaited each new release and then migrated immediately and I'd always been impressed, until now. Put bluntly Visual Studio 2015 wasn't ready for release. I should have realized this when I was watching a video a couple weeks ago in which the presenter was using the fresh-off-the-presses VS2015 RTM. Over the course of the twenty minute video he encountered three different VS bugs he had to work around. I didn't learn from that and went ahead to install it as my primary (only) version of Visual Studio on a newly formatted Windows 8.1 machine. I've been using that machine daily now for just over two weeks and I routinely encounter issues in VS2015 Enterprise. Here are some of my concerns so fa...

Update 10/2016 - This posting is better viewed in my new blog . A quick comparison of the complexity of Web API versus Empty templates in ASP.NET Web Application creation. Values were recorded through inspection of the projects and the project folders after a successful debug compile. Empty template, Web API core references NuGet Packages: 5 References: 22 Files: 61 Folders: 33 Size: 12.3 MB Web API template, MVC and Web API core references NuGetPackages: 34 References: 48 Files: 374 Folders: 157 Size: 62.3 MB

Update 10/2016 - This posting is better viewed in my new blog . The first version of Visual Studio I used heavily was VS 2003 and since then I've used every version typically installing them immediately upon RTM, sometimes even before. I've loved every version and each one has become progressively better IMO. Historically I've spent very little time working directly with HTML files focusing instead on SOA, desktop, and/or Silverlight applications and components. However, over the last year I've been doing quite a bit of work with HTML and I have to say I'm a bit disappointed in the out of the box experience Visual Studio provides with its HTML editor (at least in VS 2013). The primary cause of my disappointment stems from the implementation of auto-completion features. Auto-completion is a feature I love when working with C# code but with HTML it gets in the way FAR too often. Let's look at a couple examples that make me gnash my teeth almost every time. T...

Update 10/2016 - This posting is better viewed in my new blog . I installed Visual Studio 2012 about two weeks ago and I've been spending time experimenting with it whenever possible. I have to admit I had more than a few doubts about VS2012 going in. I disliked how Microsoft removed all colors from everything in the UI and the accents like the ALL CAP menus and the use of strings of colon characters for emphasis. I have no idea who made some of these design decisions but they were NOT made with input from the current user base regardless of Microsoft's protests to the contrary. When the beta debuted a couple months back the overwhelming top request from developers was to fix the monochrome color scheme. Microsoft went a little way towards resolving that issue by adding just a splash of color to some of the glyphs (aka icons) but the UI is still terribly bland. The first thing I did after installing was to switch to the Dark color th...