VS 2010 TestSettings - Ignore Dependent Assemblies

The testsettings in VS2010 tries to copy the dependent assemblies to the test output directory by default.
However, there might be situations where you would not want to copy the dependent assemblies. These dependent assemblies can be ignored by using the attribute ignoredDependentAssemblies

The below example shows how to ignore the dependent assemblies A, B and C and also to add a deployment item a.csv. You will need to restart Visual Studio after making this change.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<TestSettings name="Local" id="46d8e12e-16c0-4ba4-9dd9-eda66fb2ccc6" xmlns="http://microsoft.com/schemas/VisualStudio/TeamTest/2010">
  <Description>These are default test settings for a local test run.</Description>
  <Deployment ignoredDependentAssemblies="(?i:^A|^B|^C)">
    <DeploymentItem filename="TestProjectA\a.csv"/>
  </Deployment>
  .....

How to Kill open connections to a Database

I came across a scenario when I wanted to restore a Database. However I was getting an error saying the databse is already in use. I needed to find who was connected to the databse and kill that connection.
So I first ran the command exec sp_who
This gave me the spid of the connection.
Then I ran the commad kill _spid to kill this connection.

Why is Debugging in VS slow and takes forever saying "Loading Symbols..."

I encountered an issue in one of my Win 2K8 server machine where debugging a simple application in Visual Studio was taking forever. Everything was fine if you run the application but as soon as you tried debugging it, the performance was really slow and it took forever saying "Loading Symbols..."

When I went to Tool->Options->Debugging->Symbols, I found that it was referring to an environment variable _NT_SYMBOL_PATH whose value was some url which wasn't reachable.

I deleted this environment variable from My Computer->Properties->Advanced System Settings->Advanced->Environment Variables... and everything was fine after that. I was able to debug the application without any issues.

TFS 2010 - Associate existing test cases with test methods

If you want to create new test cases which are associated with test methods, tcm.exe will solve your purpose.
However, what if you want to associate existing test cases with test methods.
Here is the thread on MSDN forum which poinst out how to associate existing test cases with test methods http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/vsmantest/thread/774642af-fa44-473d-ab6d-817cfa83cf10/

TFS 2010 API - Create WorkItems(Bugs)

Here is my TechNet article
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/3280.aspx

TFS 2010 API - Get Results of a Test Run

Here is my TechNet article
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/3279.aspx

VS 2010 - No more Private Accessors (Publicize) and Code Generation

According to the below article, the visual studio team has stopped working on Private Accessors (Publicize) and Code Generation features from VS 2010
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vstsqualitytools/archive/2010/01/18/publicize-and-code-generation-for-visual-studio-2010.aspx

There are other alternatives which are listed in this article.