Visual Studio Trick - Convert Find Box into Command Box

In this blog post, I am going to show you how you can easily accomplish certain tasks within Visual Studio using Visual Studio commands from the Find Box that is provided at the top[see image below]. The Find Box is not enabled by default to appear in the toolbar, as a result few developers know about it.  The trick is that Find Box can be converted into a command box when you place a greater than < symbol in it and execute Visual Studio commands.  When I found about this I was totally psyched.  To get started lets see if you have the Find Box in the toolbar above like me.  See the image below.

If not then here is how you can enable it.  By default this will not be enabled in a fresh install of visual studio.  First click on the Add or Remove Buttons option to enable it.  Then below the Find in Files option there is just a Find option as highlighted in red box.  Click in front of it to enable it.

Once you have enabled it you can use Ctrl+D to quickly search something.  Pretty cool right but we are not there just yet. In the Find Box put a > character then start typing like File.Open or Edit.Replace something like that.  Did you just see what happened!!!

Find Box has now become a command box.  It shows all Visual Studio commands which you can use to do certain tasks without leaving your keyboard.  You might be tempted to ask me, "So Mitul is there a shortcut to insert > sign into the Find [or sorry command] Box so I can directly start typing Visual Studio commands?".  Yes there is.  Ctrl + / and it will insert > sign in the Find Box to convert it into a command box.

"So how is this useful?" and "How is this going to save me time?"

In this case you have to constantly think which tasks you do most frequently with mouse in visual studio and you can perhaps find a command for that action.  Then you can take advantage of this feature to save time.  There are predefined aliases for some of these commands.

So one of my favorite uses of command box is to open up Pending Changes window and TFS SourceControl Explorer window.  Go ahead and try to find TFS SourceControl Explorer window from the Menu and see how much time it takes.  Or even from the Team Explorer because I don’t have it always opened in visual studio.

But Ctrl + / and type View.TfsSourceExplorer and hit enter. Its opens up TFS SourceControl Explorer window for you. Again for the PendingChanges window use TFSDynamicSlientCheckin.  Opens up Pending Changes and there you are.  It is very quick and easy.  It depends on person to person how they might find this feature useful.

Pretty cool feature and yet unexplored by many Visual Studio developers out there. Check it out yourself and enjoy the productivity.  And please don't forget to share how you use this command feature in Visual Studio in the comments below.

How to do Ajax in Asp.Net MVC4 Application?

In this post, I am going to show you how to do Ajax in an Asp.net MVC4 Application using C#.  It is very easy to create a very simple Ajax demo up and running.  Here are few things you need in order to get basic Ajax demo running in your application.  The complete source code for this application is available on my gitHub account.

0. Create basic Asp.net MVC4 application using VS2012
1. You need an Ajax.ActionLink in one of your views
2. Public Method that will return a Partial View
3. PartialView with some content

Open Index.cshtml and remove all the content and paste Ajax.ActionLink as below.  Ajax.ActionLink has 12 overloads (msdn link) to do Ajax and all of them are very self explanatory.  In the code below, I am passing in the text to display as link text, the controller action to hit, and Ajax Options that’s it. 
We need a div whose content we wish to replace or the target location where we wish to replace the contents.
Then we need a public method inside our home controller that will return a partial view with some data in it.  You can pass data to the Partial View using a ViewBag.  As in our case I am using ViewBag.Tiffin variable to hold that data and retrieve inside Partial View. Next in our Partial View we retrieve it.
Hit F5 and click on the link to see what happens.  All of the text will be replaced if you created a default Asp.net MVC4 Internet application.  Because by default Asp.net Template for MVC4 Internet Application doesn’t load the Jquery Validation bundle to do Unobtrusive JavaScript.  Include this line @Scripts.Render("~/bundles/jqueryval") in your _layout.cshtml page and you are all good to go.  Run again and you should see the output.

You might be curious to ask why are you using a POST instead of GET inside Ajax.ActionLink? Because depending on which browser you are running it will cache the response and will not trigger an ajax request every time you wish to do Ajax.  To overcome this problem you can disable cache for just that method use GET in Ajax.ActionLink. 

I have recorded a screencast video to show upto this point. Check it out and if you have any feedback let me know.
Now moving on to some more stuff like how can we put animated gifs showing that something is running.  That is actually even more easy.  For this purpose we are going to use few more attributes of AjaxOptions object.  This object has some events like OnCompleted, OnBegin, OnSuccess, OnFailure and we will assign javascript functions to them.  So when we trigger a ajax request then OnBegin function we will load the gif and OnCompleted we will hide the image. 
What about passing Parameters? For this we will use another overloaded method of Ajax.ActionLink which will pass routeparameters to our public method.  We are going to change our public method and Ajax.ActionLink as shown in the code below.
Ok I get it but what about some HtmlAttributes?  Actually there is very easy you use another overload of Ajax.ActionLink and you can pass in an anonymous object with values to it.  There are different options you can consider for HtmlAttributes. And also what about jQuery mobile data-role attribtues? For jQuery data attributes you will have to use _ instead of - as shown below.  Alright but now I want to implement Async and Await into this mix how can I do that?  Hmmm. For this we will have to modify our public method inside our controller to return Task of type PartialViewResult.  That is pretty easy too.
Oh! But I am told to just use jQuery to do Ajax then you have be a little bit careful. Please check your jQuery version. If you have jQuery 1.7 then Ajax is done differently and jQuery 1.9 does little bit differently. I am using 1.9 for this demo. There is a difference where you detect start and success events. You attach these events to the document object (see upgrade guide).


What-If Error
Why Ajax is still not working out for me? Here are some very common issues which I ran into while learning Ajax in MVC4 application. 

1. Always debug using Internet Explorer.  If you run your application then Chrome will show you red error count only if you inspect the page but will happily show you the page.  Compare this to Internet Explorer it will give you Microsoft JavaScript Runtime Error.  Doing a quick StackOverflow search will give you most of the common problems’ solutions.

2. Check if you have loaded Jquery Validation bundle

3. Check if you are even loading jQuery or not. Actually this should be number 0.

4. Check if you are loading multiple versions of Jquery or validation, if yes then deletes older ones.

5. Open up fiddler to see what is going on. If I am working with web then I have fiddler open by default most of the times. And it has affected my debugging skills.

6. Put breakpoints as this is very basic debugging skill.

7. Try deleting packages for jQuery and delete related entry in packages.config and again install those packages using Nuget.

8.  The complete source code for this application and demo is at gitHub.  Check this link

Visual Studio Trick - Block Edit Code

I love Visual Studio 2012 and the improvements made in it.  You can check out my post on Visual Studio 2012 goes search first here.  However there are some features which are hidden and aren't much talked about.  And these features were there even before Visual Studio 2012.  My favorite one it how you can block edit your code using this trick.  I have always been a fan of this trick.  It has saved me a lot of typing.  Find and Replace is not always useful and quick.  I have recorded my first video demonstrating this trick which is embedded below.  

This trick can be very helpful when you have to edit a block of text at once.  You can select a block of text by pressing the Alt key and select a piece of code with your mouse. Once you have selected the text you can type or delete that piece of text.  You can also use your keyboard to select a block of code and edit.  Just press Shift + Alt + Down Arrow to select number of lines and keep Shift + Alt pressed and then press Right Arrow to select the number of characters in those lines and then simply edit.  Check out this video below.