Just got back from sunny Napier, where I presented the seventh iteration of my Visual Studio Tips n Tricks talk. It's the last one I have scheduled, and 7 is the most I've repeated any presentation in the past -- it was quite nice to polish it that much :)

I think almost every tip is linked to in one of the following posts from my blog -- if not, leave a comment and I'll post it.

Cheers,

Kirk

• Visual Studio Tips n Tricks (DEV313)
• Visual Studio - Copy references
• Turn off outlining / regions in Visual Studio
• Visual Studio 2008 tip of the day - relive the series
• Explore files from Visual Studio
• Snippet Designer released
• Ctrl + . -- Bring up that annoying smart tag menu
• Temporary Projects - You don't have to save them
• Christchurch - Visual Studio Tips'n'Tricks
• Visual Studio - Regedit your tab ordering and add a column guide

I'm in Napier presenting my Visual Studio Tips and Tricks talk to the Hawkes Bay .NET Users Group.

I think we're on at 3:30pm at the Taradale EIT Campus, but email me if you're thinking of coming, and I'll get you the info.

Kirk

[Update 8 Dec 2008: Added details below]

The session is at 3:30pm on Tuesday 9 December, at the following location:

Room C117
C-block (Computing building)
EIT (Eastern Institute of Technology)
Taradale end of Gloucester Street
Taradale, Napier

There's two handy Visual Studio features that you can't customise through the Tools -> Options settings.

Guidelines

This allows you to have a little dotted line that reminds you that your code is getting too long:

Under [HKEY_CURRENT_USER]\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\Text Editor create a string value called Guides, and put a colour and the column position(s) that you want guides to appear at (e.g. Guides = RGB(128,0,0) 79, 119)

(from http://blogs.msdn.com/saraford/archive/2004/05/05/257953.aspx)

MRU Tab Ordering

Keep your most recent files at the left of your tab channel, rather than ordering them in the order that the files were opened in:

Under the HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0 key, you can create a DWORD UseMRUDocOrdering = 1.

(from http://blogs.msdn.com/saraford/archive/2008/10/09/did-you-know-you-can-keep-recently-used-files-from-falling-off-the-file-tab-channel-331.aspx)

Cheers,

Kirk

Previous tips:

• Visual Studio Tips n Tricks (DEV313)
• Visual Studio - Copy references
• Turn off outlining / regions in Visual Studio
• Visual Studio 2008 tip of the day - relive the series
• Explore files from Visual Studio
• Snippet Designer released
• Ctrl + . -- Bring up that annoying smart tag menu
• Temporary Projects - You don't have to save them
• Christchurch - Visual Studio Tips'n'Tricks

I had fun doing the tips'n'tricks talk in Christchurch today. Most of the keyboard shortcuts I showed are in this post of mine from a few months ago, where I have compiled the C# and VB equivalents: Visual Studio Tips n Tricks

The free plugins to Visual Studio that I recommended were:

• lSnippet Designer: http://www.codeplex.com/SnippetDesigner
• lPowerCommands for VS2008: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/PowerCommands
• lSource Code Outliner: http://www.codeplex.com/SourceCodeOutliner

There's also a cool File Explorer plugin for Visual Studio by the guys from Mindscape: VS File Explorer

I also have a series of other Visual Studio tips on this blog, as well as some C# tips. Subscribe to my RSS to hear more!

Kirk

Previous tips:

• Visual Studio Tips n Tricks (DEV313)
• Visual Studio - Copy references
• Turn off outlining / regions in Visual Studio
• Visual Studio 2008 tip of the day - relive the series
• Explore files from Visual Studio
• Snippet Designer released
• Ctrl + . -- Bring up that annoying smart tag menu
• Temporary Projects - You don't have to save them