The layout of Visual Studio is very flexible. You can dock the tool windows you use the most at the location you prefer. Sometimes, you want to undock it for instance to move it to another display. Sometimes, you also undock a tool window by error 😦. When you want to dock the window where it was before, it can be complicated by dragging the window. There is a very quick way to dock the window at the same…[read more]

.NET Regexes are very powerful. You use very complicated patterns to match lots of things. But there also comes with potential problems (source xkcd): Some patterns may require more resources to match some strings. Here's an example of a Regex that may need a few seconds to run again a given string. For instance, the following regex used to validate email address from an older version of the .NET…[read more]

You often need to extend the selection to the parent context. For instance, if your cursor is in a string, you can select the whole string in a single shortcut. Press Alt+Shift+= to extend the selection and Alt+Shift+- reduce the selection: You can also select the containing block using ALT+SHIFT+][read more]

Visual Studio allows to edit multiple lines at the same time. This is very useful to apply the same change to multiple lines. For instance when you want to add the modifier to multiple properties. Multi-line editing using mouse Press Alt while selecting the block with the mouse: Multi-line editing using keyboard Press Alt+Shift+Arrow to select the block to edit: Multi-carets editing If you want to edit…[read more]

Nullable types represent value-type variables that can be assigned the null value. You can use the Nullable<T>.HasValue and Nullable<T>.Value properties to test for null and retrieve the value, as shown in the following example: if (x.HasValue) // or x != null { _ = x.Value; } In CoreFX issue about adding new analyzers in Microsoft.NetCore.Analyzers, Stephen Toub suggests to replace Nullable<T>.Value…[read more]

You sometimes close a document by error in Visual Studio. Instead of searching it in the solution explorer, you can reopen it very quickly. Press CTRL+T, R (CTRL+T then R) and select the file you want to reopen: You can select the file you want using the keyboard (Up or Down) and press Enter.[read more]

Many companies run their own certificate authority (CA). While this is very convenient for a company as they can generate certificates on demand, it means that every software that make a call to a https internal service must be aware of the internal root certificate. On Windows, you can add the root certificate to the Certificate Store using a GPO so it's very easy. Other mechanism could be used on other…[read more]

It's sometimes useful to copy multiple things to the clipboard and paste them later. However the clipboard can only contain 1 thing at a time. Visual Studio comes with a clipboard history which contains the 20 last items you copied to the clipboard. To use it, press CTRL + SHIFT + V: This is also available from the menu: The clipboard history was introduced in Visual Studio 2003. At this time, it was…[read more]

In .NET, strings are immutable. Each operation that appears to modify a string object actually creates a new string. When you are using a loop to concatenate a random number of strings, you should use a StringBuilder to improve the performance.StringBuilder represents a mutable string of characters. So, you can modify it without allocating. I sometimes see some bad usages of the StringBuilder which may…[read more]

In the previous post, I wrote about why performance is important and how to measure it for your website. In this post, I'll talk about what the different things I've made on this website to improve the performance. Some of the optimizations are just some configuration flags to turn on, others require more changes in your code. Enable HTTP/2 HTTP/2 is an evolution of HTTP/1 which comes with new features to…[read more]