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"My workplace has been having issues with VS2010 picking up old assemblies since we have been using VS2010 on a complex services solution. The issue usually pops up when executing test runs with the built in support for MSTest. This occasionally happened in VS2008 but is much more prevalent in 2010. The scenario seems to be that somewhere between the IDE and MSTest is picking up assemblies from prior TestResults directories if the assembly can't be found in bin\Debug or bin\Release directories. This means that the normal clean operation under the build menu is not sufficient to get rid of this problem. Enter the sledgehammer. I wrote a little utility that will recursively go through each bin, obj and TestResults folder under the solution path and delete everything it can (including read-only files). Any exceptions encountered will be output to the console. The code itself is really simple."

"In case you are not aware, a developer preview version of Visual Studio vNext has been released yesterday. I just played an hour with it and it seems that performances are finally here! The same way I skipped Vista to jump from XP to Wnd7 that I love, I am (as much as I can) skipping VS2010 and I'll jump from VS2008 to VS2012 that I'll hopefully love. A few random notes:"

"DPack is a FREE collection of Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 tools. DPack is designed to greatly increase developer's productivity, automate repetitive processes and expand upon some of Microsoft Visual Studio features. DPack includes various browser tools that allow the developer to quickly find solution files, types, particular type members, methods or properties for instance, or quickly find and reference standard .NET framework types. DPack includes greatly enhanced numbered bookmarks feature, various code navigation tools as well as streamlined surround with feature, and much more. See screenshots and learn more about individual features using Features menu. Major features included: Code Browser File Browser Solution Browser Framework Browser Numbered Bookmarks Surround With Code Navigation Solution Statistics Solution Backup All features support C#, VB, C++ and Ruby In Steel based projects."

"Everyone's up in arms to embrace distributed version control as the new must-have tool for the developer in the know. Though many people have not yet migrated from Subversion, those that have almost invariably extoll the virtues of their particular choice. But though all of the major DVCS's have features that set them above the previous generation of centralized systems, none stands head-and-shoulders above the others as Subversion does among the last generation: each of them was designed for a specific purpose, and each of them will serve those with different habits, workflows and development styles differently. Having used both git and Mercurial for the better part of a year, I've had the opportunity to compare the two. It saddened me to see a Twitter-based debate flamewar erupt over which is better, so I thought I'd do my best to try and ease the tension - with analogies!"

"This is a question that I get very frequently, and I always tried to dodged the bullet, but I get it so much that I feel that I have to provide an answer. Obviously, I am (not so) slightly biased toward NHibernate, so while you read it, please keep it in mind. EF 4.0 has done a lot to handle the issues that were raised with the previous version of EF. Thinks like transparent lazy loading, POCO classes, code only, etc. EF 4.0 is a much nicer than EF 1.0. The problem is that it is still a very young product, and the changes that were added only touched the surface. I already talked about some of my problems with the POCO model in EF, so I won't repeat that, or my reservations with the Code Only model. But basically, the major problem that I have with those two is that there seems to be a wall between what experience of the community and what Microsoft is doing. Both of those features shows much of the same issues that we have run into with NHibernate and Fluent NHibernate. Issues that were addressed and resolved, but show up in the EF implementations."

"The Crimson Consulting Group has just published a white paper worth reading: Comparing the Business Value of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 and Oracle Database 11g, Perceptions vs. reality in the RDBMS marketplace (April, 2011). The traditional user-friendliness of a mid-tier product has matured in terms of scalability. Today, you will find SQL Server 2008R2 installations running on 256 core machines -- scalability is no longer an issue. Unfortunately, the traditional scalability product has not grown significantly friendlier to developers and users; this leaves SQL Server 2008R2 the clear value winner for both lowest development expense and total cost of ownership for operations."

"Visual Studio 2012 comes with a lot of enhancements. One of the significant one is the Solution Explorer enhancement and it has many. Solution Explorer looks like a build from scratch. The new Solution Explorer is the combination of Object Browser, Class View, Find All References etc. Ideally you do not need to go to any other Window to work"

"Visual Studio 2010 Web Deploy alleviates most of the manual aspects of application deployment by adding a few UI based configuration pages and context menu integrations in Solution Explorer. Upon opening the project's properties, navigate to the Package/Publish Web tab on the left to display deployment options on the right."