What you see to the right is Metalscroll. It’s kind of a thumbnail view of all the sourcecode in the file you currently have open. And that is maybe not that usefull since you can’t see anything. But there’s more. if you have any breakpoints in the file you see that as small red block in Metalscroll. Bookmarks turns up as small blue blocks. If you hold down the alt-key and double click a word you see all occurences of that word as small orange blocks in Metalscrool, just press ESC to remove the highlight for this word. Simply awesome!

You can also click with the middle mouse button in Metalscrol  to get a zoomed in view of the code on that location. Well .. it’s a really neat little add-on that makes Visual Studio even more awesome then it is out of the box. Hopefully it will work with Visual Studio 2010 also!

C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v10.0\WebApplications\Microsoft.WebApplication.targets(132,11):
error MSB4064: The "Retries" parameter is not supported by the "Copy" task. Verify the parameter exists on the task, and it is a settable public instance property.
C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v10.0\WebApplications\Microsoft.WebApplication.targets(130,5):
error MSB4063: The "Copy" task could not be initialized with its input parameters.

After some debugging i realized that Visual Studio 2010 had changed a line in the csproj file of my web application project.

From:

To:

I just had to change this line back to v9.0 to get it to work again. Hopefully this can help someone that has the same problem as me.

UPDATE!

Now when the RTM of Visual Studio was released i of course ran into this problem again. This time i tried to find a better solution and found this post on devlicio. In the comments to that post i found a solution that worked great for me.

I had the same issue. I had to alter the MSbuild WebApplication file located: C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v10.0\WebApplications and remove these entries.

Retries=”$(CopyRetryCount)”

and          RetryDelayMilliseconds=”$(CopyRetryDelayMilliseconds)”

Once both of these were removed (in 13 places) everything worked fine. Hope it helps you too.

• If you are “deep down” in your application you do not have to start from the beginning again. Attach to process lets you debug the tab/window you already using.
• When you “press play” in VS and have Firefox as the default search engine you Visual Studio opens a new tab each time you start and you end up with X number of tabs with your app.
• Probably more that i can’t think of right now.

Anyway the big disadvantage with this is that it is a pretty tedious process to attach to a process.

• Press ctrl-alt-p to bring up the attach to process dialog.
• Scroll down to w3wp.exe and “attach” it. For some reason it doesn’t work to press “w” here either so you have to scroll down manually.
• Click ok and then you have to confirm that you really have to do it.

I have been doing this for months but today i decided to see if Google had any answer to my problem and surely it did. I found this question on Stackoverflow. The answer to the question was to record a macro in Visual Studio that do this for you.

• Press ctrl-shift-r to start record the Macro.
• Do the steps i described above to attach to the process.
• Press ctrl-shift-r again to stop the recording.

Now you have the attach to process as a temporary macro and can run it with ctrl-shift-p. You will get an error if you try to run it when you already attach to a process and so on but it work. If you want to you can look for the error 0x8971001E and add DTE.Debugger.Stop(True) in the catch part of the macro.

You can also save the macro and add it to your toolbar, attach your own keyboard shortcut to it and so on. Check out this article about macros on “Switch on the code”.

Link: Rob Conery

The problem with it is that it seems to fail from time to time. The output window gives no clues what so ever what has gone wrong so it’s kind of hard to debug. When you google it you get all sorts of threads and post about people having problems with this but it seems like it a diffrent solution for it everywhere.

Anyway i gave up and started looking towards MSBUILD and found this great post about how to simulate the behavior of the publish feature with MSBUILD. You just create a Build.xml file and then you run msbuild.exe build.xml. My Build.xml file looks like this.

This works great for me for now.