Visual Studio Community 2015 is the free edition of Visual Studio, so I decided to install it on my computer. Setup contains lots of components, so installation running considerable amount of time was expected, but after 3 hours, it was only 30% finished. Another hour later, the setup was still trying to install the same package. It seemed that the installation got stuck. In this post I will share how I tried to solve the problem and what eventually worked.

Do you want to create a blank solution in your VS Express but can't find it? I had this issue as well. I mostly code stuff for my personal needs so I never gave much thought on making the code more readable and organized, but on my last WinForms project I wanted to give more attention on how the project is structured. It seemed to me that the best way to achieve that was to start with an empty solution and then add necessary projects to that solution. I had trouble finding this option in Visual Studio, so I decided to write a post about it in case there are others with the same issue.

When developing .NET applications either for Desktop or Web applications, you will most likely use one of the Visual Studio Editions. As such you need to be familiar with Visual Studio IDE (integrated development environment) and in this article we will examine Visual Studio Environment most important sections.

I recently rearranged the content of my working folder which is used to store all my coding related projects. But after doing that I had problem loading solution of my WinForm project in Visual Studio Express 2012 as I received an error telling me about a problem with a project file.

Exact error message in the Output window was:

Another way you can encounter this error is if you renamed your project folder and sometimes you can get this error without moving or renaming anything at all. In this article you will be shown how to solve this problem for all those cases.

Even though Visual Studio Express is a free product, you can still create professional projects with it. But it does have few limitations. One of the features missing is Source Control System. Even if you are coding only by yourself, it really comes handy to have an ability to return to previous versions of your project in case you mess something up. You could also use it  as a version control to track history of your project.

But luckily you can still use Source Control even if it is not integrated in VS Express.

Recently I wanted to get a better understanding on what Entity Framework is all about. I looked for the blog posts dedicated to this topic and I found one such post with concrete example. I was eager to test the code, so I created a project in Visual Studio Express but to my surprise I was not able to successfully build the project as it gave me System.Data.Entity.DbContext Compilation Error.

It took me a while before I managed to get rid of this annoying error and I want to share the solution that worked for me so that it might also help others with the same issue.

Visual Studio Express is a lightweight version of VS products and although it is very powerful, it is missing several features from paid editions and one of them is ability to add a Component Class using Add New Item dialog box.

But users of Express editions can still create Component Class by following the steps below: