Visual Studio Tips

I was getting Unauthorized Access and Access is denied in IIS Express or Development Web Server all of a sudden. Turns out it was because my source control made the directory read only and this seemed to be causing the problem. I also seemed to have to restart IIS for it to start working again.

If you get the following error with the Build Notification System Tray program from the Team Foundation Server Power Tools:

"There were errors trying to contact Team Foundation Server http://ServerName:8080/ Object reference not set to an instance of an object."

You probably need to install the latest verison. The most recent version I could find is

If you prefer your own Diff/Merge tool over the standard TFS one, here is how to change the TFS configuration. Personally I use DiffMerge by SourceGear.

Note, you can specify .* for the file type extension to use your merge tool for everything.

Associating a diff tool with a file type in TFS

Common Command and Argument Values for different Diff tools for TFS

For a Visual Studio project to display tests in the Test View window it needs to be created as a "Test" project. If you want to see the tests and it was created as some other kind of project originally, you should be able to add the following in the element in you
.csproj file which is XML based:


<ProjectTypeGuids>{3AC096D0-A1C2-E12C-1390-A8335801FDAB};{FAE04EC0-301F-11D3-BF4B-00C04F79EFBC}</ProjectTypeGuids>


Now Visual Studio 2008 should display all your unit tests in the Test View window.

Thanks to this article for helping me out with this one.