According to the blurb:

Consolas is intended for use in programming environments and other circumstances where a monospaced font is specified. All characters have the same width, like old typewriters, making it a good choice for personal and business correspondence. Optimizing the font specifically for ClearType allowed a design with proportions closer to normal text than traditional monospaced fonts like Courier. This allows for more comfortable reading of extended text on-screen.

And it does what it says on the tin. I also like the fact that it is more compact so you can fit more code on the screen.

Here is trusty old Courier New 10pt:

And here is the same text in Consolas 10pt :

I often end up opening the *.csproj as a text file from explorer, but then of course, I lose all the Intellisense goodness.

Perhaps I’m slow but it wasn’t until today that found out how to do it in Visual Studio:

1. Simply right-click the project and choose "Unload Project".
2. Right-click the "unavailable project" and choose "Edit {project filename}"

Once you’ve done that you get the joys of syntax highlighting and Intellisense.

Error 1325.’WebDesignerCore’ is not a valid short file name.

Needless to say, a brief episode of profanity ensued. But fear not: after a bit of googling and struggling, I managed to sort it out. Hopefully, if you are having the same problem then this will help you.

1. Open your temp folder. The easiest way is to hit Windows+R and type "%temp%" and hit OK.
   
2. In that folder look for files matching VSMsiLog*.txt. You are looking for the log file that was created when you installed VS2008 Beta 2. Check the Date Modified field if there are several - although I imagine there should only be one of these at this point. Open it in WordPad (Notepad seems to struggle with the size of this file - mine was 47 MB).
3. Search through the file for the term "WebDesignerCore" until you find a match that looks like a file path. In my case it was:
   

   MSI (s) (7C:48) [07:38:56:490]: PROPERTY CHANGE: Adding wcu_VWD.3643236F_FC70_11D3_A536_0090278A1BB8 property. Its value is ‘K:\WCU\WebDesignerCore\’.

   The VS uninstall script is looking here so if doesn’t exist it will fail. In my case it didn’t exist because K was the drive letter I used when I mounted the VS 2008 Beta 2 ISO image for installation and I had since unmounted it.

4. Put the original VS 2008 Beta 2 setup media in place so that that path exists. In my case I had to mount the ISO image (using Daemon Tools) and change the drive letter to K.
5. Now uninstall Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2!

Good luck!

My previous company outsourced the development of a software project and I ended up reviewing the code from the first iteration. I had concerns about some of the code; one concern was that they had used Visual Studio’s Unit Test Wizard to auto-generate their unit tests.

There are three main reasons I dislike this feature.

1. Discourages test-driven development
   There is a growing consensus that test-driven development results in better tests, better code coverage, higher quality code, and more productive development. Visual Studio’s auto-generation of test methods discourages such a test-driven approach, as it requires the code to have been written before the tests are generated.
2. Causes method-centric tests
   Auto-generation of test methods results in tests that are method-centric rather than requirement-centric. The issue with auto-generated, method-centric tests is that a) they don’t have descriptive names, and b) they promote the belief that if you write a test that calls that method then it is “covered” - regardless of how many branches there are in the logic of the method.
3. Creates homogenous tests
   I believe that the unit tests should be a collection of “little stories” that describe the system. But auto-generated tests all look the same. They don’t give you a good feel for what a system does because each one is just the setup for a method call and the evaluation of the result. To paraphrase Groove Armada, if every test looks the same, you get tired of looking at them!
4. Causes test fatigue and weak tests
   This is perhaps the biggest problem with the tool and it results from not using a test-driven approach. Once Visual Studio has kindly generated, say, 50 test method stubs, the developer is faced with the task of “filling them all in”. In my opinion, these tests are likely to be weak. Not only because the developer is temporally disconnected from the spirit and nuances of the various underlying requirements than he would have been with a test-first approach. But he now has a mammoth task ahead of him. By the time he hits test #15 he is going to be suffering from “test fatigue” and is very likely to start compromising on test quality to just get it over and done with.

I’m not saying that ALL unit tests developed with this wizard are necessarily flawed. I’m just saying that it increases the liklihood of poor quality tests. And poor quality tests are perhaps more dangerous than no tests…”I ran the Unit Test Wizard, filled in the blanks, did some refactoring. Whadya know! All the tests pass…RELEASE IT!

I’d like to consign this feature to the dustbin.

The solution was to add the following line to the <startup> tag of nunit-gui.exe.config (and nunit-console.exe.config if you are using it from the command line):

EDIT: For the final release of Visual Studio 2005 you would of course use:

You may need to comment out all the other supportedRuntime entries to get it to work.

Having got NUnit to test a .NET v2.0 assembly, my next task was to get it working as the debug harness for my class library projects like I did with Visual Studio 2003.

I was quite hopeful. I did everything as I had done for my VS 2003 projects…but no - they NUnit and VS2005 did not want to play nicely together! When I ran the project, NUnit did launch, but when I clicked “Run” nothing happened.

I spend a couple of hours trying to get it to work but to no avail. Eventually, out of desperation I downloaded the latest iteration build of NUnit (version 2.2.2 as of this writing). I set the 2.2.2 version of nunit-console.exe to be the startup program (remembering to update its config file with the “supportedRuntime” stuff mentioned above)…and voilà! It works a treat!

So if you can’t get NUnit to work with VS 2005 - try to download the latest drop from http://www.nunit.org/download.html