How to add Intellisense to Visual Studio Code for bootstrap

Peoples who are habitual of using intellisense in Visual Studio and suddenly it is found missing then they really get mad during the work. Today I am trying to create some html pages with bootstrap for learning. I was feeling little hard to do code with bootstrap, because I am not able remember all of the class names of the bootstrap.

There are lots of glyphicon classes which is hard to remember. Visual Studio has this nice feature by adding JavaScript library path to the “_references.js” file and after that everything available in autosuggest mode.

What happened with me, I am not able to find the correct gylphicon class name without intellisense. Regarding this I have googled and found that this feature is not currently available in VS Code right now. However, it has been added as a feature request for upcoming updates.

Do not disappoint, There is also hope to do work with intellisense in VSCode. You can use extension"HTML CSS Class Completion".

Open Command Palette by press ctrl+ship+p Then run  “ext install HTML CSS Class Completion” to install this extension. Check the results in below image to see after enabling this extension.

image

Happy coding!

Customize context menu in Nevron Diagram

Scenario:

I had a requirement for preventing user to edit the “Composite Shape” elements (e.g. Text Primitives, Ports etc.). This restriction is required during the development for most of the cases because programs are using these shapes for some special purpose representation and these should not be altered by the use at run time to keep them consistent.

If user change these shapes then it will be hard to know that it has been modified this diagram is saved as XML string in some data store. If shape elements are used to identify the shape elements by name then it will break the program for being consistent for these shapes. See the below image, If the edited port name is used in program to  identity the center port then it will be distinguish the center  port in all of these ports.

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Finally, it is required to remove some commands from the context menu of the shape in the diagram view for the user so that user will not able to modify the shape elements.

Solution:

At first place, you need to use the “Protection” on the shape to prevent some operation. You can restrict few operation on the shape for the user.

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These can be set programmatically, these are just for making restrictions on the shape not for the context menu operations. See below code example:

NAbilities shapeAbilities = new NAbilities();
shapeAbilities.All = false;
shapeAbilities.InplaceEdit = true;
shapeAbilities.ResizeX = true;
shapeAbilities.ResizeY = true;
shapeAbilities.Export = false;
NShape shape = (NShape)nDrawingDocument1.ActiveLayer.Children(null)[0];
shape.Protection = shapeAbilities;

Real Solution
The simplest solution is that create a custom context menu builder for creating context menu for the current diagram view.  This will create/add the required command that you want to provide to the user while working in the diagram.

First create a Custom ContextMenuBuilder by inheriting “NDiagramContextMenuBuilder” class and override “BuildContextMenu” method. There you need to create the context menu and add the required commands to the created context menu.

internal class CustomContextMenuBuilder : NDiagramContextMenuBuilder
{
    public override NContextMenu BuildContextMenu(object obj)
    {
        NContextMenu contextMenu = new NContextMenu();
        contextMenu.Commands.Add(CreateCommand((int)DiagramCommand.Delete, false));

        return contextMenu;
    }
}

After that create an instance of this custom context menu builder and assign it to the ContextMenuBuilder property of your diagram command bars manager:

nDiagramCommandBarsManager1.ContextMenuBuilder = new CustomContextMenuBuilder();

Create and preview website page using Visual Studio Code

Today is the first day when i have used Visual Studio code after uninstalling the Bracket. Bracket has nice feature live preview to run the html document in the browser. I was expecting the same in Visual Studio code but it took me half an hour to figure that how to run the html from VSCode. VSCode use Node.js for most of the work to be done.
Finally i have figure out that how to start a small project, containing only a single HTML file in VSCode and edit it with preview in a browser similar to live preview feature in Bracket. I have all my tools setup to start creating my first project in VSCode but if you are not installed VSCode and Node.js then download VSCode and Node.js.  You can find little bit information to install Node.js here.
After you have done installation of the Node.js, either you need to setup the PATH variables in windows or the setup automatically done this work for you. You can verify this by typing below command on command prompt that Node package manager is globally accessible or not:
npm -v

Now it the right time to setup the webserver. Run the below command on the command prompt:
npm install -g live-server

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Now create a html file in VSCode configured folder.

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To preview the html document, run the below command at the project folder.

live-server


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It is also possible to see the live preview in VSCode split windows. You have follow below steps to do this:

  1. Create a live-view.md file with this in it (Place it wherever you want. I put it at the base folder of all my projects since I can use it for whatever I'm currently working on):
    <div style="border:1px solid #777;
    position:absolute;left:10px;top:10px;bottom:10px;right:10px;"> 
      <iframe src="http://localhost:8080/"; width="100%" height="100%" frameborder="0" /> 
    </div>
    
  2. Open live-view.md in the second/split pane in VS Code and click the "Open preview" button (top right of file).
Happy coding.

Run CSharp “Hello World!” program on Developer Command prompt

To start writing your first program without using the Visual Studio or other tools, you just need to open “Command Prompt”. Just type command on the search in Start menu either you are using Windows 7 or any higher.

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Visual Studio installs few command line tools to do some operation using command tools and these can be invoked using the “Developer Command Prompt for VS2015”(For Visual Studio 2015). If someone has not installed Visual Studio then just install .NET Framework on the computer.

After this we are ready to create and compile our “Hello World!” program using the .NET Framework compilers.

Now create a file “hello.cs” using the “notepad”. We are going to write our code to print “Hello World!” on the screen for this example. “.cs” is the common extension for the C# file and “.vb” for Visual Basic. So now we going to create a C# program now so this file will contain C# code.

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After running this command a prompt will appear with message “Do you want to create a new file?”. Click on “Yes” to create a new file.

In this we are going to create a class with a static method “Main”. In a Console application that would run on command prompt, CLR look for class named “Program” with a “Main” method to run the program.

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Now save this file and come back to the command prompt.

Now one of the tool “csc.exe” exists in the “Windows” directory in the .NET framework installation paths. It can be located at the path “C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\{.NET Framework}”. Under the Framework folder you will find installation of .NET Framework multiple version. Below is the path of the latest one on my system. It is the “Visual C# Command Line Compiler” which compiles the C# code.

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Now we are going to compile the C# code then execute the program. After compiling the program C# compiler produce a executable file(.exe).

To compile the created C# code file, use the below command line on command prompt. Just pass the created “hello.cs” as parameter.

  1. csc hello.cs

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On windows we can run exe. Now run the hello.exe to view the result of our example program.

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That’s all done. We have created an example program run on the command prompt using the C# command line compiler.

Actually it transforms C# code into Microsoft Intermediate Language. This can either an exe or dynamic link library. We specify the assembly format to the csc.exe using the /target:library option. See below image for various target options:

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  Happy Coding!

Configuring Orchard CMS blog in Open Live Writer

After using Windows Live Writer, now I have start using Open Live Writer to do remote blogging. Right now WLW is not able to connect with few blogging platforms like blogger.com and also Microsoft has stopped putting efforts on the amazing tool for the bloggers.

OLW is an open source tool which is developed by the contribution of the developer community. Lots of features of this tool is under development. It has the main advantage that there are many tools available as compare to the HTML editor on the remote blog. You can work offline, which might be good if you’re in a situation where you don’t have a decent internet connection or not able to connect to internet for days. It will let you write blog posts and save them to draft for later publishing.

In this article, you will go through the steps to configure Open Live Writer for the Orchard CMS. This provide support for remote bloging through XmlRcp. Both WLW and OLW are able to connect with the Orchard CMS blog using this feature.

Orchard provides this XML-RPC feature out of the box and You have to enable it in the Modules section inside your Orchard CMS Orchard admin panel.

Prerequisites:

  1. You have setup Orchard CMS on your web hosting or local IIS and created a blog on website.
  2. Installed OLW on your computer.

If you have done pre work then go to the Administration Dashboard of Orchard and click the Modules. There you will find Remote Blog Publishing feature under the Content Publishing section. It is dependent on XmlRpc so if you enable it then XmlRpc feature will automatically enabled.

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To enable Remote Blog Publishing click the Enable link. After clicking the enable link you will see both of them enabled at once since they are dependent features. After you click Enable, if everything is Ok then you will see following message:

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After enabling these modules you are ready to configure Orchard blog in Open Live Writer. Now, launch Live Writer from your Start menu in Windows.

In Blog Accounts section, click on 'Add blog account'

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When you choose “Add blog account” then you will see below prompt to select the blog service. Choose “Other blog service” from the available options and click Next.

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Type the URL to your Orchard blog, along with the admin user name and password that you defined when you set-up Orchard for the first time.

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Click Next. Open Live Writer will connect to your blog in order to read the XML-RPC capabilities that Orchard supports and download the current Theme (for previewing posts before publishing). If you are prompted to create a temporary post during this step, select "Yes" in the dialog.

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After that it will complete downloading supporting files and template for making blog post writing intuitive.

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Once it finishes, you will have window where you can specify the name of your blog you have just configured in Open Live Writer, click Finish.

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Now you are ready to write blog post for your Orchard CMS blog.

Prevent minification to manipulate Angular JS controller parameters

In AngularJS controller can have $scope or $http parameters. These must be $scope or $http rather than s or h. Minification process removes extra spaces and convert JavaScript method parameters to single character so that it tries to convert them in single character parameters.

When we declare a controller using the module then most of us just simply specify the controller method as below:

var app = angular.module("githubViewer", []);
//Controller
var MainController = function($scope, $http) {
};

app.controller("MainController", MainController); //MainController is controller method

During the learning, I get to know that during the minification process these parameters are changes to some single character. If these are renamed then AngularJS will not able to find the $scope and $http parameter. It expect them as 6 character $scope and 5 character $http in the controller method. To avoid this happen you need manually specify the parameters name when you specify the controller name and controller method to the module.

app.controller("MainController", ["$scope", "$http", MainController]);

       Hope this help someone to avoid making this mistake..

“Object reference not set to an instance of an object” after install of Visual Studio 2015 Update 3.

Yesterday I have installed update 3 for Visual Studio  2015 Community edition. At that time set failed due to internet disconnection during the installation. Somehow setup completed but when Visual studio was not working correctly. It was showing “Object reference not set to an instance of an object” when try to select any item in visual studio as shown below:

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Solution
To resolve this issue I have tried to repair the Visual Studio using Program and Features in Control Panel but still the situation is same. After doing some research I found that it is the issue with the configuration setting and common files for the visual studio located at following locations:

  1. C:\Users\{user}\AppData\Local\Microsoft\VisualStudio
  2. C:\Users\{user}\AppData\Local\Microsoft\VSCommon

Delete the content from these folders. If you do this way then all of your user settings such as Visual Studio layout, linked Microsoft account or start page settings get lost.

If you have installed multiple version of the Visual Studio then it is sufficient do delete folder ComponentModelCache on path
C:\Users\{user}\AppData\Local\Microsoft\VisualStudio\{version - 14 or 12}. It will preserve other setting of the Visual Studio. If it does not work then delete all content from the “Visual Studio” folder.

Some times it require to run “devenv /resetuserdata” command to reset the user data of the visual studio. I did it also using the Developer Command Prompt for Visual Studio Console but you can find this command tool at following locations:

  1. [x64] C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0\Common7\IDE
  2. [x86] C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0\Common7\IDE

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Hope it will save time for someone rather doing uninstall or install for Visual Studio again.