Command-line Cyclomatic Complexity in VS2008 with VS2010 free Metrics.exe

Visual  Studio had code complexity metrics, but they were only available in the GUI. (At least for code coverage you could call the private assemblies and roll your own command-line tool.) However, VS 2010 offers  a free power-tool that lets you run complexity metrics from the command line! The result is an xml file, so you can leverage that for anything you need.

These blogs tell more:

·         http://blogs.msdn.com/b/camerons/archive/2011/01/28/code-metrics-from-the-command-line.aspx

·         http://devmatter.blogspot.com/2011/01/visual-studio-code-metrics-powertool.html

Part of the cool thing is even if you're still on VS2008 (!), and you can't buy a 3rd party tool (NDepend!), you can still use the 2010 power tools to call .Net 3.5 assemblies. So, you could install VS2010 on your build server and use the power tools on 2008 builds.

Troubleshooting Visual Studio Profiler with ASP.Net

[This was originally posted at http://timstall.dotnetdevelopersjournal.com/troubleshooting_visual_studio_profiler_with_aspnet.htm]

Visual Studio 2008 (and I think 2005) come with a built-in .Net profiler. Profilers are especially useful for troubleshooting performance bottlenecks (Related: CLR Profiler for old versions of Visual Studio; SQL Profiler). There are already good tutorials on it, so here I'm just offering misc tips and troubleshooting. Basically, you can go to Analyze > "Launch Performance Wizard", and just select all the defaults. You can use this with ASP.Net web projects too.

Error: When trying to start, I got "Value does not fall within the expected range".

Solution: You can set the config of a website to "Any CPU".

Error: VSP1351 : The monitor was unable to create one of its global objects

Other times I got this error:

Error VSP1351 : The monitor was unable to create one of its global objects (Local.vsperf.Admin). Verify that another monitor is not running, or that another application hasn't created an object of the same name.
Profiler exited
PRF0010: Launch Aborted - Unable to start vsperfmon.exe

Solution: You can use Process Explorer to see what is locking "vsperf.Admin", and then kill that process tree. For me, it was the aspnet_wp.exe process.

Error: PRF0010: Launch Aborted - Unable to start vsperfmon.exe

Sometimes I got this error:

PRF0010: Launch Aborted - Unable to start vsperfmon.exe
Error VSP1342 : Another instance of the Logger Engine is currently running.
Profiler exited

Solution: I restarted Visual Studio (yes, it's lame, but it appeared to work). I also ensured that all other instances of VS were closed.

Error: Sometimes clicking the stop button caused IE and VS to crash, without even collecting data

Solution: By just closing the IE browser directly, it worked.

R6034 - An application has made an attempt to load the C runtime library incorrectly

[This was originally posted at http://timstall.dotnetdevelopersjournal.com/r6034__an_application_has_made_an_attempt_to_load_the_c_run.htm]

A coworker recently got this error when trying to open a web application project within Visual Studio 2008:

Runtime Error!

Program: C:\Prog...

R6034

An application has made an attempt to load the C runtime library incorrectly. Please contact the application's support team for more information.

Note that in this case, (1) Visual Studio opened just fine, (2) the problem was in merely loading a web project, and (3) nothing was even being compiled yet.

It turned out the problem was likely from a corrupt uninstall of the .Net 3.5 SP1. By re-installing the SP, things began to work again.

NOTE: .Net 3.5 SP1 has a potential error with the web dlls, so you may need to make some tweaks to the GAC.