Thursday, April 23, 2015

Visual Studio Reference Concerns and Reference Tweaker (pt. 1)


            Visual Studio manages the .NET Framework assembly references well on a project basis.  It is automatic but also brings about confusions in some situations.
It is easy to understand that when the Target Framework of a Visual Studio project is upgraded to a newer version, e.g. from 3.0 to 4.5, all old references will be replaced automatically with new versions if available, and when downgrading similar happens.  We always added or removed references through the Visual Studio Reference Manager in the past and things behaved well for .NET Framework assemblies.  However, inconsistencies happened to us occasionally for custom (library) assemblies.  Some projects had been upgraded to reference to new library DLLs, but many others did not. The inconsistency caused serious problems (loading or running) especially for those strong named assemblies.  It was time-consuming and error-prone to inspect references one by one and projects one by one manually using the Properties and Reference Manager UIs.  That was the initial idea of developing the Reference Tweaker to help.
Some readers may have already tried the Reference Tweaker of the Visual Smarter.  The full name of the widget should be Multiple-Project Reference Tweaker actually, as it works with multiple projects instead of a single one.  Currently, it supports removing and adding references from and to multiple projects of the current solution.  In terms of replacing references, we recommend removing first and adding next.
Through using the Reference Tweaker, we corrected many reference inconsistencies in many projects and solutions.  However, we wondered what would happen if some .NET Framework assemblies with versions different from the Target .NET Framework of some projects of concern (or simply they did not target to the same .NET Framework) were brought in, so did an experiment.


As can be seen, the .NET Framework of the project was target at 4.5.  The assemblies automatically referenced in by the Visual Studio wizard resided at the v4.5 location in the Program Files root directory.  The .NET assemblies were going to be added by the Reference Tweaker came from the Framework 4.0 in the Windows directory.  People might wonder why we did not use the same versions of .NET assemblies as specified by the Target Framework (4.5 here) of the project of concern.  The fact was there were no higher versions (e.g. 4.5 or 4.5.1) at the same location in the Windows root.
Luckily enough, Visual Studio automatically adjusted the versions of the .NET Assembly references to the same as specified by the Target Framework.  

Things went well so far.  In terms of why still some looking inconsistencies among the assembly Folder Name, assembly Version, and Runtime Version, we found it was as designed through some research.  That will be discussed next.  Please stay tuned.

 


Wednesday, April 22, 2015

Where to Download?

Visual Smarter is a powerful and cost effective add-in for Visual Studio. It makes .NET coding easier and smarter. The current version is Visual Smarter 2015. It is FREE to download, FREE to try, and FREE to update in each major version.

The latest build can be downloaded by clicking the image on left. Payment can be made on right.

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Tuesday, April 21, 2015

What Visual Studio Editions and Versions that Visual Smarter Support

Visual Smarter 2015 is an add-on for Visual Studio.  It makes .NET coding easier and smarter.  It provides many tools (about 400) to help manage Visual Studio solutions, projects, settings, editors, source files, methods, properties, versions, attributes, and much more. 

It supports the following Visual Studio editions:

  •   Ultimate
  •   Premium
  •   Professional
  •   Community
Is supports the following Visual Studio versions:

Monday, April 20, 2015

What is Visual Smarter?


Visual Smarter is an add-in for Visual Studio.  It makes .NET coding easier and smarter.  It provides many tools to help manage Visual Studio solutions, projects, settings, editors, source files, methods, properties, versions, attributes, and much more.  

Its current version is Visual Smarter 2015. The Visual Smarter software itself has been around for a few years. It ever supported Visual Studio 2008, 2010, and 2012 as an add-in. Now it is an extension for all the three main stream Visual Studio versions, 2015, 2013 and 2012. In case the Visual Studio edition of all the three versions supports extensions, Visual Smarter 2015 can work with it. 

It has almost double dozens of powerful common utilities and hundreds of various coding, refactoring and managing widgets for Visual Smarter IDE and compiler so far. Here are the powerful common utilities in the latest Visual Smarter 2015:

            It has 22 Common Utilities:
 Common Utilities


           Its total 329 widgets can be categorized into the following 10 groups: