Visual Studio - Expecting someone geekier

Jim Bennett

Senior Cloud Advocate at Microsoft, Xamarin Certified Developer, author of Xamarin In Action, blogger, speaker, father and lover of beer, whisky and Thai food. Opinions are my own.

Redmond, WA, USA
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Debugging multiple Azure Functions apps at the same time

Featured Jim Bennett 13 Nov 2018 Technology, azure, functions, Visual Studio, debugging

Dentists don't want you to know these 5 tips that show how easy it is to run multiple Azure Functions apps locally and debug them all at the same time! Number 3 will shock you! Enough ClickBait nonsense, on to the post. I recently built a demo app that has two Azure Functions projects in it - one using the new V2 Functions runtime and written…

Creating Visual Studio project and solution templates - Part 3, VS for Mac extension

Featured Jim Bennett 08 Nov 2017 technology, xamarin, Visual Studio, Mac, extension, dotnet new

In the first part of this set of posts I looked at creating a dotnet new project template, and in the second part I showed how you could easily add this to a Visual Studio for Windows extension. Lets now look at adding it to a Visual Studio for Mac extension, so that our template is available everywhere. It's really easy to create extensions for V…

Creating Visual Studio project and solution templates - Part 2, VS for Windows extension

Featured Jim Bennett 06 Nov 2017 technology, xamarin, Visual Studio, extension, dotnet new, windows

In the first part of this set of posts I looked at creating a dotnet new project template. These are great if you like the cli, but if, like me, you'd rather be able to do File->New then dotnet new is not much use. Instead you need a Visual Studio extension that provides a new project or solution type to the IDE. The good news is that you can ea…

Specflow support in Visual Studio for Mac

Featured Jim Bennett 01 Jun 2017 xamarin, Visual Studio, Mac, Technology, add-in, extension, specflow

Love Specflow and Visual Studio for Mac? Well you are in luck as there is now a working extension for Visual Studio for Mac to enable full specflow support including generating feature files with syntax highlighting. It's all open source and built upon the amazing work by Mike Jones. You can find it on GitHub at https://github.com/straighteight/Sp…

Opening multiple solutions in Visual Studio for Mac

Featured Jim Bennett 23 May 2017 xamarin, Visual Studio, Mac, Technology

One area Macs are very different to Windows PCs is in the way documents are opened. Mac apps manage documents internally instead of being able to tap a start button again and open a second instance of your app to load a new document. This means that on Windows Xamarin developers can open multiple instances of Visual Studio at the same time, allowi…

Nugetizer 3000

Featured Jim Bennett 10 May 2017 xamarin, Technology, nuget, Visual Studio, Mac

One cool new feature in Visual Studio for Mac is the ability to create NuGet packages from your projects automatically whenever you compile. This new feature is thanks to a cool project started by Xamarin called the Nugetizer 3000 (I do love Miguel's naming conventions). It's really easy to turn this on. From your project open the project properti…

MvvmCross extension for Visual Studio 2017

Featured Jim Bennett 20 Jan 2017 Technology, mvvmcross, Visual Studio, vs2017, xamarin, mvvm, windows

Update - it's now on the marketplace! Link here: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=JimBobBennett.MvvmCrossforVisualStudio The awesome team at Microsoft have got it all working, so I've managed to upload the VS2017 version to the marketplace. You can now download it from Extensions and Updates. Thanks to everyone on the VS extens…

MvvmCross Extension for Visual Studio for Mac

Featured Jim Bennett 10 Jan 2017 xamarin, xamarin.ios, xamarin.android, mvvmcross, Visual Studio, Mac, Technology

I've been working to update the MvvmCross Xamarin Studio add-in to work with Visual Studio for Mac. The add-in has been updated thanks to some help from Matthew Robbins, the author of the awesome MFractor add-in, which if you don't have you MUST get, it's awesome. This add-in is now available from the VS for Mac extension manager!…

MvvmCross add-ins for Visual Studio and Xamarin Studio

Featured Jim Bennett 26 May 2016 xamarin, Visual Studio, mvvmcross, add-in

I've been using MvvmCross a lot at work and it's pretty cool. I've got a big upcoming personal project that I've started working on (more info soon I promise - it's something pretty awesome), and I've decided to use MvvmCross for it. Unfortunately despite all it's awesomeness, creating a boilerplate cross platform solution using MvvmCross is stil…

Images for an iOS app

Featured Jim Bennett 14 Aug 2014 Visual Studio, Technology, iOS, ios, javascript, technology, node

When developing for iOS there are a number of different image sizes needed. Just for the springboard icon you need different sizes for iPhones and iPads, both retina and normal versions. When you add spotlight icons (again both retina and normal), iTunes icons the list gets huge. To help with this and to practice my Node.js skills, I created a n…

Synergy

Featured Jim Bennett 16 Jun 2014 Visual Studio, Technology, Development, iOS, synergy, shared screen

As you've probably seen from my other posts, I'm developing iOS apps using Visual Studio on Windows as my development environment, and a MacBook Pro for running the actual builds. This is a pain when I want to test. As good as Ripple is, it's not as good as the actual iOS simulator. It's a pain jumping from one computer to the other. Thats wher…

Using Visual Studio to develop Cordova apps part 2 - Creating an app

Featured Jim Bennett 27 May 2014 Visual Studio, Cordova, Technology, Mac, Development, iOS, Using Visual Studio to develop Cordova apps, angular, topcoat

Building on the previous post in this series, I thought it would be fun to try to learn Angular.js and include this in my Cordova app. I could also do with so nice looking widgets, so I decided to have a play with TopCoat. First thing I need is an app to build. One of my current 'First World Problems' is having to convert from US units (mg/dL) t…

Using Visual Studio to develop Cordova apps

Featured Jim Bennett 13 May 2014 Visual Studio, Cordova, Technology, Mac, Development, iOS, Using Visual Studio to develop Cordova apps

So after yesterdays attempt to create a 'Hello World' app using the new Cordova tools for Visual Studio, I thought tonight I'd try again. If you haven't heard the news, Microsoft announced a CTP of support for Cordova inside Visual Studio. Thats right, Microsoft is opening up to a world of other devices. The aim is to allow you to build HTML5 ap…

Waiting

Featured Jim Bennett 12 May 2014 Visual Studio, Time, Cordova, Technology

Every journey begins with a first step. Unfortunately that first step is not always made as soon as the journey is ready to begin. Over the past few days I've been starting the preparation for a new life. My family and I are escaping the rat race for a while. I'm working out the notice period on my nine-to-five, my wife is packing up the house a…