Searching the Visual Studio Toolbox

Ever want to add a control to the design surface, but you have so many controls that you have a difficult time finding them? I was shown this neat shortcut that has saved me a lot of time over the past few days.

Click on the toolbox or use the Hotkey Alt+Ctrl+x
Start typing the name of the control. The control will be highlighted

If you have multiple controls that match the text, hit Tab to go to the next one.

Simple and easy!

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Quickly and Easily Deploy Websites/Web Services with TFS Build via Web Deploy (MSDeploy)

When I first started deploying code from TFS I took the simple approach and created a batch file and deployed the websites via RoboCopy. I’m a very “Keep it simple” kind of guy, so this worked for us for a long time and so nothing was changed. With my most recent project however, we were deploying code over a slow VPN tunnel from our servers in Chicago to servers located in Europe. Due to this, the RoboCopy was taking over 4.5 hours to complete. I needed a better/faster way so I started looking into Web Deploy (MSDeploy). I was able to get it working fairly easily and I was pleasantly surprised how easy it was to get it working, and how much time its saved me! I can now deploy the code in less than 20 minutes! I’ve outlined the process in detail below, but in general you only need to do this: Add MSBuild parameters to your automated build Customize the deployment parameters for the website Create a batch file to an auto-generated MSDeploy script Execute the batch file fro...

Build/Deploy Windows service with TFS

Building and deploying a web service or website via TFS is pretty straight forward, but automatically deploying a windows service or console application takes a b it of setup. I’ve outlined the steps below to get your service deployed. Step 1: Set up Automated Build and MSDeploy on the Target server. If you are doing any sort of automated build/deploy I recommend using MSDeploy. You can follow steps 1-3 from a previous post here . Step 2: Edit the .csproj file The project file for the app you are trying to deploy needs to be edited so that TFS will create a directory for the output of the project. Otherwise the project will be built, but the assemblies will be placed in the code drop location with no organization to it. To edit the file, go to the open file dialog and locate the csproj file. Select it but don’t click “Open. Instead click on the dropdown arrow next to the Open button, select “Open with”, and choose the XML (Text) editor as shown: Once the file is open, add the fo...

Executing .ps1 files in a DockerFile

This week I was trying to containerize an existing java application. Part of "installing" the application on the container required executing an PowerShell script in the container during the Image build. Based on the documentation here I thought i could add the following command to my dockerfile and it would work: RUN install.ps1 However, when I went to build the image, it just hung on that step. I tried several other variations of the run command including: RUN ["Powershell", ".\install.ps1"] which resulted in the following error: '["Powershell"' is not recognized as an internal or external command,operable program or batch file. RUN ["Powershell.exe", ".\install.ps1"] which returned the same error as above. I was about to give up and move the PowerShell commands from the .ps1 file directly into the dockerfile itself as described here , but I had an "A HA!" moment and decided to give a simpler a...

The Althoff Chronicles

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