Dom Cosgrove Blog

STSDev is a useful utility for accelerating your SharePoint Application development. The tool creates your initial project structure for you, gives the assembly a strong name (for GAC deployment) and most importantly provides a number of custom build events that facilitate deploying your solution.

A nice thing about STSDev is that it gives the developer exposure to the build events that its counterparts do not (e.g. my other friend WSPBuilder). You can really see what is going on behind the scenes which really helps when you need to get down to the nitty gritty.

One issue that I come across regularly is that when I build and deploy my solution with STSDev then try to debug it, the break point is never hit. The reason for this is that the build configuration are not configured to output the debug info. The following shows you how to fix this in Visual Studio 2008:

1. Open your STSDev created project in Visual Studio 2008;

2. From the Toolbar select Project | [Project Name] Properties…;

3. Select the build tab on the Project Property Page;

4. Scroll down to the bottom of the build page and select Advanced…;

5. On the Advanced Build Settings dialog box set the Debug Info to Full;

6. Click OK and rebuild and deploy your project, you should now be ready to debug your solution.

XML Comments Let You Build Documentation Directly From Your Visual Studio .NET Source Files by J. Andrew Schafer

C# allows developers to embed XML comments into their source files—a useful facility, especially when more than one programmer is working on the same code. The C# parser can expand these XML tags to provide additional information and export them to an external document for further processing. This article shows how to use XML comments and explains the relevant tags. The author demonstrates how to set up your project to export your XML comments into convenient documentation for the benefit of other developers. He also shows how to use comments to generate help files.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc302121.aspx