This is Part 4 is my series on using Gulp with Visual Studio. So far we've covered setting up Visual Studio for use with Gulp, processing SASS, and getting the files ready for deployment. Part 1: Setting up Gulp with Visual Studio Part 2: Getting SASSy Part 3: Deployment: minification and concatenation Part 4: Code quality: tests and linting Part 5: Thoughts on Gulp In...

In my previous blog I wrote about how we can use Gulp to compile SASS. This time it's all about how we can use Gulp in Visual Studio to prepare files for a release by minifying and concatenating them. I've put up a project using the standard MVC 5 template for this series of posts here Part 1: Setting up...

Getting SASSy with Gulp in Visual Studio In my previous blog I showed you how to set up Visual Studio for use with Gulp. Now I want to show you how you can use it in everyday development, including processing SASS, running tests, linting your code and getting ready for deployment. In this series of posts I'll talk about how you...

In the last few years a rich set of front end development tools has emerged for building complex web applications. Gulp in particular has taken off in a huge way. However, .NET development is lagging when it comes to adoption of these tools. This is all set to change, especially with the release of ASP.NET 5 where Gulp will become part of the standard...

Searching the web there are plenty of articles about Visual Studio 2015 and all that it brings with it, but you may have to dig down to get to some of the new features that will be instantly of help in your everyday activities.  Here are the five lesser known ones that most interest me... Debugging Lambda expressions This has been...

Quite often when creating a database you will need tables of static data.  These range from simple lookups to date dimensions in a data warehouse.  You can easily create these in an SSDT project.Presuming you have already designed your tables and they are present in your project;Create a folder in your project called StaticData then add a sql script...

If you are creating a sql server project with SSDT (see here) and your sql refers to another database you will need to add a database reference to allow the project to build. You can do this by right clicking your references folder and selecting 'Add Database Reference' If the database you are referring to is also a part of the...

Database DevOps - SSDT and TeamCityUsing Visual Studio and SSDT you can immediately publish a fresh database or update an existing one by simply right clicking the database project and choosing 'Publish'. This will bring up a dialog that lets you edit the connection string to your database and set various options related to the publish.At this point you have a choice...

There are all sorts of reasons why this is a good idea.  Not least because you can version control, unit test and tie into your CI system any existing database. How many times have you found inconsistencies between a test and live database, not known which one is right and been unsure who to ask on your team?  In my...

I have just spent the last few days trying to get a SQL Project to build, deploy, run unit tests and create a dacpac on our build server which uses TeamCity. It wasn't a simple process and I had to accept a few conditions that I wasn't overly keen on but the upshot is that it works now and...

TeamCity comes with MSBuild so that you can build your solutions directly by selecting a runner type of MSBuild in the Build Step.  You can also choose the version of Visual Studio your developers use and since TeamCity 8.1, Build Tools for 2013 are supported too. However if you need to run MSTest for your unit tests TeamCity recommends you install the...