I published my first VisualStudio extension on 26th February 2018. It was initially created for Visual Studio 2017, but a few months later Visual Studio 2019 came out and I needed to support it as I was one of the beneficent. The migration was straightforward: it required only to extend InstallationTarget range to [15.0,17.0) in vsixmanifest, re-compile, and of course, re-publish the extension to the Visual Studio marketplace. Recently, the Visual Studio 2022 Preview was published. ... Read More

I discovered the power of Roslyn over three years ago and since then I’ve developed three Visual Studio extensions and a couple of code analyzers. Because I work on those tools only in my free time, the word “time” is a key here, so automation really matters. So far I’ve been using AppVeyor for building and testing my extensions. However, I’m a huge fan of integrated solutions because they require much less work for setup, and since GithubActions became generally available I wanted to give it a try. ... Read More

I’m a programmer but I don’t like to write code. OK, it’s not the whole truth. I don’t like to write the code that is repeatable. Whenever I need to do something more than twice, I start thinking about automation. Hopefully, this problem can be addressed with code snippets. Visual Studio provides a predefined set of snippets that can be extended, but if you are a Resharper user you should definitely get to know LiveTemplates because it’s more powerful and easier to configure. ... Read More

A few weeks ago I posted about negative aspects of applying AutoMapper. As an alternative I suggested typing all mapping code by hand or utilize some kind of generator like T4Scaffoling or something Roslyn based. In the past I experimented with T4Scaffoling but it was quite tedious. It requires preparation of templates in T4 syntax, referencing it to the project and writing some PowerShell code to provide data for templates. There also was an issue with assembly locking. ... Read More