How to fix 8000000A error when building VDPROJ

The Microsoft Visual Studio Setup Project is an old technology to create installer developed by Microsoft. It is out of support from nearly a decade and not present in Visual Studio anymore but when I visit customer sites I find legacy technologies and I need to deal with it on the short-term.

A couple of days ago I was working on an automated CI build on Azure DevOps and we hit an issue when trying to compile an old VDPROJ (migration to Wix in progress, btw ☺). We encountered an HRESULT 8000000A error.

Visual Studio Debug – Tips And Tricks – Part 1

We use Visual Studio many hours a day but can we say that we know all the tips and tricks?

Here I share a brief collection of 3 debugging tips that I collected.

Step into specific

This feature is helpful when we have a situation like below. We set a breakpoint in line 9 and when the program counter hits that point. Now we would like to jump directly into Spagetti() without stepping into Parmiggiano(). To do so we right-click the program-counter line, Step Into Specific and then Spaghetti().

Run To Cursor (CTRL + F10)

If we have a situation like the following picture we may want to run to line 20 without stepping-over (F10) many times. With Run To Cursor we can run to the statement where our cursors is located and stop there. We can do this with right click, Run To Cursor or with the CTRL+F10 keyboard shortcut.

Peek definition

If we want to look quickly without changing context to a definition of a method or class we can use the ALT+F12 keyboard shortcut. It opens a frame inside our current code to show details of what we selected.

TL; DR

In future posts I’ll share other tricks! Stay tuned!

VSTS for beginners: improve quality with continuous integration in 3 easy steps

In this blog post we’re going to configure a build process in VSTS to enable continuous integration for our ASP.Net Core example web-app.
Continuous integration is a powerful technique to prevent merge-hell and improve quality on the “left” stages of our software production process. In the fast-paced world of development we want to merge into the main line of development the new developed features as soon as possibile to avoid open branches that will cause painful merges. If we keep our unit of work small and focused we’ll have great benefits.

Agile@School – settima lezione

Settimo appuntamento presso la scuola rodigina IIS Viola/Marchesini per il progetto Agile@School nella giornata di ieri 24 gennaio 2018. Si è giunti alla parte finale dove cerchiamo di mettere insieme tutte le parti finora studiate. Ci siamo dati come obiettivo quello di realizzare una semplice app per l’accesso a Twitter mettendo in gioco le conoscenze apprese.

Agile@School – quinta lezione

Oggi siamo giunti al giro di boa per all’IIS Viola/Marchesini di Rovigo col progetto Agile@School e Xamarin: quinta lezione su dieci.

Il clima natalizio si è sentito e gli studenti erano tutti di buon umore e carichi.

How to setup a Private Agent in Visual Studio Team Services

In the last post about VSTS (Visual Studio Team Services) we setup the foundations for a project.

In this we install a private agent to build and deploy our project.

VSTS provides hosted agents to build and deploy. When we use a hosted agent, Microsoft takes care of the maintenance and upgrades. So for many teams this is the simplest way. Every agent has a set of capabilities that indicate what it can do. Capabilities are name-value pairs that are either automatically discovered by the agent software, in which case they are called system capabilities, or those that you define, in which case they are called user capabilities.
If the hosted agents do not suit our needs we can setup our dedicated agent and that’s the topic of this post.

How to get started with Visual Studio Team Services

In this post we’re going to explore how to get a full enterprise-grade development platform for free in 4 steps. Microsoft is offering for free the same environment that all of its sw engineers use every day to us.