GuruStop.NET

In case you haven’t noticed the update of my previous post about VS 11, Resharper 6.1 nightly build supporting VS 11 has been out already.

• To download Resharper for VS 11: 
  http://confluence.jetbrains.net/display/ReSharper/ReSharper+6.1+Nightly+Builds
• To learn more about Resharper 6.1: 
  http://blogs.jetbrains.com/dotnet/2011/11/resharper-61-eap-opens-much-more-than-a-bugfix-release/
• For details on how the experience with VS11 in general is like, compared to VS2010: 
  http://gurustop.net/blog/2011/11/10/notes-on-using-visual-studio-11-as-primary-ide-on-windows-7/

Notes On Installing Resharper 6.1 Nightly Build For VS11

• The file you download is not an EXE, but it is still an installer. All You need to do is run the file and press "Install"
• You can use the license key mentioned in the download page, but, you may try your existing Resharper 6.0 key as well and see if it works.
• Likely the Resharper keyboard shortcuts won’t work directly. You need to enable them yourself. More on that below…
• UPDATE: If you install a nightly build, then a new build comes out and you try to install it, you get "This extension is already installed to all applicable products.". More on that below…

To enable the Resharper keyboard shortcuts:

In Visual Studio 11, go to Resharper Options menu:

It’s been quite sometime since I first installed VS 11 (soon after dev preview came way), so, I thought I’d share my experience around using it as primary IDE (with VS 2010 solutions most of the time):

• It works nicely with Visual Studio 2010 solutions, even big real-world ones. It doesn’t convert them but does some changes to project files which are backwards compatible (mainly minor formatting changes). Note that from the source-control point of view, those are still changes.
  • Somehow all my IIS 7.5 application pools lost their "Enable 32-bit applications" option very shortly after that. This is too coincidental with Visual Studio 11, although I’m not 100% sure if it was the reason.
    It could be hard to debug, If you start getting errors like "unable to load assembly <some path>.dll. or one of its dependencies. An attempt was made to load a program with an incorrect format.". Check for that option.
• It works a bit faster than Visual Studio 2010. Maybe because it has fewer plug-ins, but I think if I remember bare-bones Visual Studio 2010 correctly, this Visual Studio 11 one is still (slightly) faster.

Yesterday I wrote about how to get old style add-ins (showing in Tools-> Add-ins Manager) to run in Visual Studio 11, demonstrated with Test Driven .NET.

Today I write about getting Visual Studio Gallery extensions (showing in Tools->Extensions Manager) to work with Visual Studio 11, demonstrated with Git Source Control Provider.

The two posts depend on minor changes to the Visual Studio 2010 versions of the plug-ins.

Visual Studio Extensions Gallery

When you run Tools->Extensions Manager in Visual Studio, it looks at Visual Studio Gallery feed and reads what’s in it. When you choose to install an extension, you download a ".vsix" file, that contains all the files of the extensions and then run it.

So, to get an extension to work with Visual Studio 11, go to the Visual Studio Gallery website to download the extension ourselves.

http://www.visualstudiogallery.com

Now, in the "FIND" box, try to reach what you want, for this exercise we’ll look for Git Source Control Provider.

Click on the plugin you want in the result:

Then on the download link in there (verify it’s VS 2010 extension)

For this example, on http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/63a7e40d-4d71-4fbb-a23b-d262124b8f4c

Background (Safe to skip)

I have been using Visual Studio 11 as primary IDE instead of Visual Studio 2010 at work all day. Details of that might come in a later post, for now, this is on a specific problem. Getting TestDriven.NET to work with Visual Studio 11.

The current project uses MbUnit for number of Selenium functional tests locally and on CI servers. We used to run those using Resharper 5.x in Visual Studio 2010. When Resharper 6 came out, the Gallio / MbUnit Resharper plug-in that made running those tests possible was not compatible with it (and still is not to the date of this post), so, we used TestDriven.NET instead.

When Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview came out,, all installed plug-ins didn’t work with it.

Plugins are two types:

1. Visual Studio Extensions: Downloaded from Visual Studio Gallery usually,, which is browsable from the IDE Tools-> Extensions Manager menu
2. Old Style Addins: Usually have their custom installers, which basically drop a ".addin" file (which describes the add-in to Visual Studio) along with the DLLs that make the plug-in. The default location is My DocumentsVisual Studio 2010<or 11 for the preview>Addins. Sometimes, addins are in other locations as well.

Just a quick note, if you install Productivity Power Tools For Visual Studio 2010.

It has a nice feature.. Copy code as html. The feature doesn’t add any new menu option or whatever, simply when you copy the code the usual CTRL+C or Edit -> Copy way in Visual Studio, and paste it in a text-only editor like Notepad, it’ll be treated as text normally, but if you paste it in an HTML capable editor like Microsoft Word, it’ll be paste as HTML.

Note

If you already know what the feature is, and have a problem with Live Writer 2011 or similar version, you can skip to the title that mentions it.

• If you wonder how  made this rectangular selection, you can do it by pressing ALT before selection and holding as you move the mouse to continue to select
• If you wonder why, simply to avoid the spaces on the left in the pasted code

If I paste this in notepad, nothing new!

But if I paste in Word 2010 (Outlook is the same)

(it can be better if play with font size and text wrapping options)