Kirk Jackson's Page of Words - VS2008Tips

Visual Studio 2008: Remember toolbar positions

Kirk Jackson — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 09:55:57 GMT

Visual Studio 2010 will have better support for a multi-monitor setup, but it's possible to get part of the way in 2008 already.

Toolbars and property windows (e.g. Solution Explorer, Class View) can be dragged into separate windows (2010 will add the ability to drag documents into separate windows too):

Window positioning gets a bit weird when you switch from one monitor to another, or change resolutions - a common occurrence when you're a laptop user docking and un-docking.

You can create two settings files, one for your single monitor layout, and one for your multi-monitor layout, and use them when starting Visual Studio 2008:

Arrange your windows the way you like them
Go to Tools > Import and Export Settings > Export selected environment settings
You get a great tree-view of every possible setting category in Visual Studio. Click the top node to deselect everything, and scroll down and select only General Settings > Window Layouts:
Save your settings file somewhere handy (e.g. d:\multimon.vssettings)
Repeat for each layout you like

Now you have two or more settings files, you just need to create a shortcut icon for each one somewhere in your start menu.

Edit the target, and add the parameter /resetsettings D:\multimon.vssettings to the end (replace the path with each settings file path).

Now when you launch your new shortcut, it will start Visual Studio 2008 with the correct window layout. Because you only exported and imported the Window Layouts, all the other settings stay the same.

You may also want to make these changes to your shortcut:

Add the /nosplash parameter to your Target, to avoid the "Visual Studio" splash screen and make it slightly faster to start (perception is everything!)
Check the Run as administrator option, which is useful if you often need to restart Visual Studio to connect to the ASP.NET worker process when developing under IIS.

Cheers,

Kirk

Previous VS2008 Tips:

Napier - Visual Studio Tips

Kirk Jackson — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 08:40:49 GMT

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

In Napier on Tuesday

Kirk Jackson — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 10:29:04 GMT

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

Visual Studio - Regedit your tab ordering and add a column guide

Kirk Jackson — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 05:31:22 GMT

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:

Christchurch - Visual Studio Tips'n'Tricks

Kirk Jackson — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 08:10:17 GMT

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:

Temporary Projects - You don't have to save them

Kirk Jackson — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 22:06:03 GMT

Here's a great Visual Studio 2008 option that I didn't know existed until a few months ago:

Under Tools -> Options -> Projects and Solutions, you can uncheck the "Save new projects when created" option to let you whip up a little project to test something out, without having to bother with saving it somewhere permanent.

When creating a new project, instead of this:

You'll get this:

No longer do you have to name your project "ConsoleApplication64"! You can use ConsoleApplication1 as often as you want :)

Where does it save these temporary projects, you may ask? They get stashed in a Temporary Projects folder underneath your profile's AppData directory.

When you close the project or quit Visual Studio, you'll get a prompt asking you if you want to keep the project:

If you choose Discard, it will be removed from disk and you'll never see it again!

ConsoleApplication1, here I come!

Kirk

Previous tips:

Ctrl + . -- Bring up that annoying smart tag menu

Kirk Jackson — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 09:16:16 GMT

Finding it hard to click on that little red line to bring up the menu?

I find it really hard to get the mouse in the right place to bring up the smart tag menu:

My favourite key combo in Visual Studio is Ctrl + . (hold down control, press the dot). If you do this when you have the cursor near the smart tag, the menu will pop up. You can then use the keyboard arrow keys to go up and down to select (Enter) the option you want.

Ctrl + .

Magic.

Kirk

Previous tips:

Snippet Designer released

Kirk Jackson — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 23:29:59 GMT

Sara Ford points to the release of Snippet Designer by Matthew Manela.

Snippets are a remarkably cool productivity tool within Visual Studio. I say "remarkable", because many people don't even know they exist!

It's great to have a UI over the top of the snippet XML files, which are a little painful to edit by hand. Snippet Designer lets you select a section of code, and export it to the designer to create a snippet:

(I had to cheat to get the screenshot of the menu... anyone know how to do that?)

Then you're dropped into the Snippet Explorer's designer surface, where you have three or four simple steps:

Right-click a symbol and create a replacement (above, I turned the 'argument' variable into a replacement). A replacement is text that the user can edit when using your snippet.
Edit the details of the replacement, including the default value and tooltip text.
Add a shortcut to your snippet.
(Optionally) Enter $selected$ $end$ where you'd like the cursor to appear after the snippet is finished. This is imported for SurroundsWith snippets, as the text you're surrounding will be replaced here.

Then simply save the snippet into your snippets directory inside My Documents (the default location is probably right), and now you can use your snippet when editing code.

Type the shortcut string (mine was 'fow'):

Press "Tab" "Tab":

And you end up in the first replacement variable, with the default value entered. Over-write the text with what it should be, and press Tab to jump to the next replacement. Continue pressing tab until everything is correct, and press Enter. You'll jump to the middle of the replacement text:

The snippet file is just XML, so you can edit it directly, or copy it to other computers easily.

There are a lot of snippets installed out of the box, you can browse them using the old Code Snippets Manager (under the Tools menu), or using the new Snippets Explorer installed by the Snippets Designer (under View -> Other Windows).

I'll be showing off the Snippets support in future Visual Studio tips n tricks talks. If you're interested in more tips, I have a Visual Studio 2008 series on this blog, or you can visit Sara Ford's blog.

Explore files from Visual Studio

Kirk Jackson — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 01:00:50 GMT

Last month the guys from Mindscape released a Visual Studio File Explorer Addin. This is really useful if you don't have good source control integration within Visual Studio, or you want access to the full goodness available from an explorer window, but within Visual Studio.

The feature list:

Fully Shell Enabled – So shell extensions like TortoiseSVN work just fine.
Command Prompt Here – Opens a command prompt at the current folder.
Snap to Solution – Sets the root folder to the current solution’s folder.
Split View – Windows Explorer style.
Open Item – Either in Visual Studio or the registered application.
Options Dialog – For configuring the add-in.

And a screenshot:

It's good at twice the price! Download for free from the Mindscape site: Visual Studio File Explorer Addin

Kirk

Visual Studio 2008 tip of the day - relive the series

Kirk Jackson — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 12:16:34 GMT

Sara Ford has been publishing a great series of Visual Studio 2008 tips of the day, since July 2007.

I have given a couple of Visual Studio tips'n'tricks talks lately, and have recommended to the audience that they should go back to the beginning of the series and read her tips from the start.

If the thought of reading over a years worth of daily posts in a web browser scares you, I have assembled a Yahoo Pipe that grabs posts from 410 days ago and sends them out in an RSS feed, just like it was July 2007:

http://pipes.yahoo.com/cpkirk/saraford410

Each day you'll get the most recent posts from 410 days ago showing up in your feed reader.

Click the above link, and choose one of the options to add it to your feed reader, or you can even subscribe to email alerts each time there is new content (well, actually it's 410 day old content masquerading as new content).

Yahoo Pipes

Yahoo Pipes are pretty cool, they let you do transformations on a bunch of different types of data sources, and then re-expose them as a new feed.

In this case I have used an RSS feed from a Google blog search, as they allow you to search for posts on a given site and return all the results Google has cached. In Sara's case, Google will return 368 posts whereas her own feed only gives the most recent 15.

The pipe just builds up the right query string for Google, and then passes the url to the feed fetcher. The source is visible when you visit the pipe, although I have to admit that it's pretty simple and you could probably figure it out yourself :)

Blog series

It's interesting when you try to join part-way through a long running series on someone's blog.

The newest post at the top of their site (and your feed reader) is halfway through the series, so you have to scroll or read through the archives to get the earlier posts.

I often find when I stumble across "Part 7 of 11" blog posts that entering late puts me off subscribing to that blog, because of the weight of having to read so much to catch up so I can join the conversation.

Perhaps having a "Subscribe to this series from the beginning" link using a similar trickle fed time shifted approach would help people overcome that?

Irony

It did feel a little like having 10,000 spoons when all I needed was a knife to use a Yahoo beta product to pull data from a Google search to send people to a Microsoft employee's blog posts. Ain't the internet great!

Many thanks to Sara for the great series.

Kirk

Turn off outlining / regions in Visual Studio

Kirk Jackson — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 00:08:41 GMT

I got asked this last night in Christchurch: "How do you make it so regions are always expanded?"

There's a couple of different ways to do this:

You can turn off outlining altogether, in the Advanced Settings under C#:
You can learn the keyboard shortcuts for expanding and contracting outlines: Did you know how to collapse and expand code - Sara Fords blog
Or, you could reduce your use of regions (I've found they're often used to hide code, when really it should be refactored).

Kirk

Visual Studio - Copy references

Kirk Jackson — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 21:51:09 GMT

That was embarrassing. I went to demo the "Copy References" feature in Visual Studio 2008, and I couldn't remember how to do it.

That's because it's not in the standard install of Visual Studio, but is part of the PowerCommands for Visual Studio 2008 package.

Check out the feature list that I've copied below. Some really useful stuff, you should download now and install it!

Enable/Disable PowerCommands in Options dialog
This feature allows you to select which commands to enable in the Visual Studio IDE. Point to the Tools menu, then click Options. Expand the PowerCommands options, then click Commands. Check the commands you would like to enable.
Note: All power commands are initially defaulted Enabled.

Format document on save / Remove and Sort Usings on save
The Format document on save option formats the tabs, spaces, and so on of the document being saved. It is equivalent to pointing to the Edit menu, clicking Advanced, and then clicking Format Document. The Remove and sort usings option removes unused using statements and sorts the remaining using statements in the document being saved.
Note: The Remove and sort usings option is only available for C# documents.
Note: Format document on save and Remove and sort usings both are initially defaulted OFF.

Clear All Panes
This command clears all output panes. It can be executed from the button on the toolbar of the Output window.

Copy Path
This command copies the full path of the currently selected item to the clipboard. It can be executed by right-clicking one of these nodes in the Solution Explorer:
The solution node; A project node; Any project item node; Any folder.

Email CodeSnippet
To email the lines of text you select in the code editor, right-click anywhere in the editor and then click Email CodeSnippet.

Insert Guid Attribute
This command adds a Guid attribute to a selected class. From the code editor, right-click anywhere within the class definition, then click Insert Guid Attribute.

Show All Files
This command shows the hidden files in all projects displayed in the Solution Explorer when the solution node is selected. It enhances the Show All Files button, which normally shows only the hidden files in the selected project node.

Undo Close
This command reopens a closed document , returning the cursor to its last position. To reopen the most recently closed document, point to the Edit menu, then click Undo Close. Alternately, you can use the Ctrl+Shift+Z shortcut.
To reopen any other recently closed document, point to the View menu, click Other Windows, and then click Undo Close Window. The Undo Close window appears, typically next to the Output window. Double-click any document in the list to reopen it.

Collapse Projects
This command collapses a hierarchy in the solution explorer starting from the root selected node. It can be executed from three different places: solution, solution folders and project nodes respectively.

Copy Class
This command copies a selected class entire content to the clipboard. It can be executed from a single project item or a project item with dependent sub items.

Paste Class
This command pastes a class entire content from the clipboard. It can be executed from a project or folder node.

Copy References
This command copies a reference or set of references to the clipboard. It can be executed from the references node, a single reference node or set of reference nodes.

Paste References
This command pastes a reference or set of references from the clipboard. It can be executed from different places depending on the type of project. For CSharp projects it can be executed from the references node. For Visual Basic and Website projects it can be executed from the project node.

Copy As Project Reference
This command copies a project as a project reference to the clipboard. It can be executed from a project node.

Edit Project File
This command opens the MSBuild project file for a selected project inside Visual Studio. It can be executed from a project node.

Open Containing Folder
This command opens a Windows Explorer window pointing to the physical path of a selected item. It can be executed from a project item node

Open Command Prompt
This command opens a Visual Studio command prompt pointing to the physical path of a selected item. It can be executed from four different places: solution, project, folder and project item nodes respectively.

Unload Projects
This command unloads all projects in a solution. It can be executed from the solution node.

Reload Projects
This command reloads all unloaded projects in a solution. It can be executed from the solution node.

Remove and Sort Usings
This command removes and sort using statements for all classes given a project. It can be executed from a solution node or a single project node.
Note: The Remove and Sort Usings feature is only available for C# projects since the C# editor implements this feature as a command in the C# editor (which this command calls for each .cs file in the project).

Extract Constant
This command creates a constant definition statement for a selected text. It can be executed from the code window over a selected text.

Clear Recent File List
This command clears the Visual Studio recent file list.

Clear Recent Project List
This command clears the Visual Studio recent project list.

Transform Templates
This command executes the associated custom tool with text templates items. It can be executed from a DSL project node or a folder node.

Close All
This command closes all documents. It can be executed from a document tab.

Kirk

Visual Studio Tips n Tricks (DEV313)

Kirk Jackson — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 11:02:41 GMT

I had fun preparing and presenting the Visual Studio Tips n Tricks talk at TechEd last week... although I think about half the jokes fell flat!

Here's the slides -- you'll see there's not much of value in them:

DEV313-Jackson-VisualStudioTips-Clean.pptx (1.4 MB)

...and that's because most of the talk was the demo. I walked through a lot of Visual Studio keyboard combinations that I find useful, as well as walking through some of the features that can make you more productive, such as the snippet manager, settings management and macros.

Here's a table of all the keyboard shortcuts I used:

	C# Key Combo	VB Key Combo
View.ShowSmartTag	CTRL + .	CTRL + .
Edit.ParameterInfo	CTRL + SHIFT + SPACE	CTRL + SHIFT + SPACE
Edit.Find	CTRL + F	CTRL + F	Quick find
Edit.IncrementalSearch	CTRL + I	CTRL + I	Incremental find
Edit.FindInFiles	CTRL + SHIFT + F	CTRL + SHIFT + F	Find in files
Edit.Replace	CTRL + H	CTRL + H	Quick replace
Edit.ReplaceInFiles	CTRL + SHIFT + H	CTRL + SHIFT + H	Replace in files
Edit.GotoNextLocation	F8	-	Go to next location (in search results)
Edit.GotoPrevLocation	SHIFT + F8	-	Go to previous location (in search results)
Edit.FindNext	F3	F3	Repeat search
Edit.FindPrevious	SHIFT + F3	SHIFT + F3	Search previous
Edit.FindNextSelected	CTRL + F3	CTRL + F3	Search for next with selected text
Edit.FindPreviousSelected	CTRL + SHIFT + F3	CTRL + SHIFT + F3	Search for previous with selected text

View.NavigateBackward	CTRL + -	CTRL + -	Go back to previous location (Browser-style)
View.NavigateForward	CTRL + SHIFT + -	CTRL + SHIFT + -	Go forwards to next location
View.ViewCode	F7	F7	View code
View.ViewDesigner	SHIFT + F7	SHIFT + F7	View designer when in markup
View.ViewMarkup	SHIFT + F7	SHIFT + F7	View markup when in designer

Edit.CycleClipboardRing	CTRL + SHIFT + V	CTRL + SHIFT + V	Cycle through Visual Studio clipboard

Edit.GotoBrace	CTRL + ]	-	Jump to opposing brace / XML tag
Edit.GotoBraceExtend	CTRL + SHIFT + ]	-	Select text to the opposing brace / tag

Edit.GotoFindCombo	CTRL + /	-	Jump to the find combo in the toolbar

Window.ShowEzMDIFileList	CTRL + ALT + DOWN ARROW	CTRL + ALT + DOWN ARROW	Show popup of all open files

Debug.Start	F5	F5	Start with debugger
Debug.StartWithoutDebugging	CTRL + F5	CTRL + F5	Start without debugger
Debug.Restart	CTRL + SHIFT + F5	SHIFT + F5	Restart the program
Debug.StopDebugging	SHIFT + F5	CTRL + ALT + BREAK	Stop debugger
Debug.RunToCursor	CTRL + F10	CTRL + F10	Run to the cursor
Debug.ToggleBreakpoint	F9	F9	Set / remove breakpoint
Debug.DeleteAllBreakpoints	CTRL + SHIFT + F9	CTRL + SHIFT + F9	Delete all breakpoints
Debug.EnableBreakpoint	CTRL + F9	-	Enable a breakpoint
Debug.StepInto	F11	F11	Step into a method
Debug.StepOut	SHIFT + F11	SHIFT + F11	Step out of a method
Debug.StepOver	F10	F10	Step over a line

Tools.RecordTemporaryMacro	CTRL + SHIFT + R	-	Start recording a macro
Tools.PlayTemporaryMacro	CTRL + SHIFT + P	-	Playback a macro

If you want an even more comprehensive list of keyboard combinations, you can check out the following links, or go exploring in Tools > Options > Keyboard:

C# Keybindings

VB Keybindings

C++ Keybindings

Cheers!

Kirk