Developer Rants

VS2005 oddity.

When configuring VS2005 solutions under version control you should not check in the binary suo file.
This however is the file that contains the memory of which is the default project.
The only way around this I have found was to move the project that you want to be the default to the top (well the first non directory) of the sln file (In the Project bit). You also need to move the project up the postSolution section to the top of the list.

There does not appear to be any way to control this in the IDE that is not recorded in the suo file.

This is not documented anywhere I can find.

It appears that the default project is the first project added to the solution. 

The Microsoft documentation in msdn is both complete and lacking.

There is enough detail available to resolve most problems. However the examples are so poor that it can be hard to find out about why you would use them.

For example:

$year$ = this is expanded into the year. This is very useful for compyright headers.

They are also incomplete.

Templates in VS 2005 allow developers to easily replace or add to the items that are available when you select new item.

Templates are zip files containing:

• .vstemplate

• one or more custom files.

By customising these you can save a lot of cut-and-paste time and effort.

This page of Template parameters is not complete.

$safeitemrootname$ = This appears to be the name that the user enters into the dialog.

If you combine this with multi-item templates as defined here. This allows you to use the supplied name as a root of a class. For example you could have a template that takes a name such as Entity.cs that creates the following files:

• EntityModel.cs
• IEntityModel.cs
• IEntityView.cs
• IEntityController.cs
• EntityController.cs

$fileinputname$ = This also work in the template

$XmlConvert_itemname$ = what does this do? I think this is a wizard populated item.

It appears that the WizardExtension appears to work in item templates too despite the documentation.

I will investigate this and will post about it.