Visual Studio 'Run' button is disabled, or problems with build

Sometime very strange things happens with Visual Studio. The one have happened to me maybe three times for all time, and each time I already forgot that I need to do to fix it! So basically your simptoms can be any of the like:

1) Your Run (F5) button is disabled;
2) Your program is not recompiled and hitting Run causes running old version of the 'exe' that lies in the Debug folder;
3) Then hitting F5 you receive error messages like "Visual Studio cannot start debugging because the debug target 'C:\your\path\bin\Debug\Project.exe' is missing. Please build the project and retry, or set the OutputPath and AssemblyName properties appropriately to point at the correct location for the target assembly.'

That usually that happens absolutely sporadically with you doing nothnig with the project or solution preferences, which confuses a lot. Now, in 99% of the cases the solution is to go to the Build->Configuration Manager... and check that Build checkbox is checked for required projects, see picture:



What makes them suddenly unchecked is still a mistery to me.

Working with Subversion from Mercurial

My favourite VCS is Mercurial. Before that I used SVN, and I have no regrets about it. But it's still popular, and from time to time I have to use SVN. Here is solution how you can work with SVN from Mercurial. I didn't tried it myself yet, but will certanly try it then time comes.

Updated 02.05.2012. So, the need has come early, and I tested it. It works! I'm almost sure it's buggy to work flawlessly with advanced reps, but if you need to just grab some repo it's definetely enough.

Documentation XML auto-comments

Actually I was quite sceptical about auto-commenters which stubs some text into your thriple-slash '///' Documentation XML comments. But after using AtomineerUtils and GhostDoc for some time I must admit: if you are serious about your code quality any of this kind of tools is a must. It saves a lot of time. I was suprised if not impressed about how much actually can tool get from variable name and produce adequate comment. You can even leave it as it is, though it will be absolutely useless, but it's absolutely much easier to fix this predefined comment then to write one from a scratch.

For a most of us C#/VB.NET users, I would recommend GhostDoc, but there are some unique features in AtomineerUtils which you can try out. If you are C/C++ coder then AtomineerUtils is the only solution you have, and you're lucky because it's also extremely good.

Complexities of C/C++ development in modern world

I have not worked with C for a very long time, until recently, then I started DiggerC project. Working with .NET all last years I've took for granted it's all the benefits this architecture gives you. Going back to pure C is like a fresh shower. I'm talking not just about manual memory management, it's least significant part. The most significant thing, that I realized almost immediately — you are almost alone with a C Standard library and a WinAPI. There is just no convenient mechanism for creating reusable libraries in C. At best you can find something like this, but no more. The other part is code manipulation. The .NET 1.0 based Visual Studio .NET (i.e. 7.0) C# projects had same, or better "IntelliSense" support than you have now in Visual Studio 2010 for C. No refactor, comment or almost any other basic coding support feature, you name it — it's not there.

C/C++ code Documentation XML in Visual Studio

It's amusing how Visual Studio C++ IntelliSense team completely ignores documentation helper functions of text editor, given that C/C++ code is much harder to analyze without comments than managed code. For example you don't get anything on typing /// (three slashes) before function.

Gladly I'm not the only one annoyed with this, so a cool guy named Jason Williams wrote a tool named AtomineerUtils which does just that. Again I note it does this in C/C++ code, not just managed code (in which BTW I satisfied with built-in functionality of Visual Studio.

So here is resume, and don't consider it advertisment. You want nice and clever way to add smart XML comments to your C/C++ code in Visual Studio, then AtomineerUtils is what you want. I must add that while this tool is not free, it's price — $10 is more then reasonable for that you get with it.