I think Visual Studio's static analysis warning for checking parameters for null before they are used is generally a good idea, but the code to check the parameters can get really tedious.

Before addressing the tedium, though, why does it even matter whether you check for null arguments and throw …

I kept getting a message from Visual Studio 2008 when opening a solution saying:

This solution contains a web site at 'http://localhost/Services'. There is already a web site at this location on this computer. Do you wish to use this existing location for your web site (existing files …

I've just finished switching over our development environment from Visual Studio 2005 to Visual Studio 2008 (except for a C++ solution that uses boost, which will take some further effort). These are the things that I needed to do, and the gotchas I encountered.

1. Getting installed - Aside from being a …

I'm working on switching from VS 2005 to VS 2008. I just tried running some unit tests and got the following dialog:

Hooray! I've been trying to figure out how to implement automatic test cleanup myself, but I (fortunately) hadn't had time to devote serious effort to it. Up to …

"It works on my machine" is not a very solid defense. And when something baffling is happening in your code on a non-development machine, and logging doesn't give enough clues, it can be a good time to take advantage of remote debugging.

In the past I've equated remote debugging to …

This morning I was asked to enable the Windows XP visual styles for our application. No problem -- I've done that for applications many times. Just drop the appropriate manifest file in the right place, call InitCommonControls and all should be well. When I tried that this morning, though, I got …