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Tips and Tricks - Visual Studio Blog

15 minute blog post: A Hidden Feature in Visual Studio 2010

June 5, 2010 Jun 5, 2010 06/5/10
Visual Studio Blog
The sunset in Seattle was spectacular this evening. My wife and I climbed the water tower in Volunteer Park to look across the Sound as the sun dipped behind the Olympic mountains and, in the space of a few minutes, the sky turned from blue to orange and pink. We both agreed that the Emerald City and its surroundings can be breathtakingly ...

Tips and Tricks: Apply (or Don’t Apply) Cut or Copy commands to blank lines

March 25, 2010 Mar 25, 2010 03/25/10
Visual Studio Blog
As you may know, Visual Studio’s cut and copy commands are useful for more than just selected text.  If you invoke them when there is no selection, VS will cut or copy your entire line, which saves you the trouble of selecting the line before adding it to the clipboard.  Although a lot of developers find this helpful, we occasionally hear ...

Troubleshooting pkgdef Files

March 22, 2010 Mar 22, 2010 03/22/10
Visual Studio Blog
For those using the Visual Studio 2010 SDK to create extensions for Visual Studio, you should find the creation and use of .pkgdef files to be mostly automatic (see What's a PkgDef and Why?). However, like anything involving computers and software, there are occasions that require manual intervention because they aren’t covered by the ...

Tips and Tricks: Quickly Closing Documents

March 20, 2010 Mar 20, 2010 03/20/10
Visual Studio Blog
In VS 2010, we made a design decision to move the “X” from the right side of the Tab Well  to within each tab.  Before (VS 2008) After (VS 2010) The majority of feedback around this change was positive, but, as with most UI changes, there has been a vocal group that preferred the older placement.  When asked what ...

Tips and Tricks: Clipboard Ring and Toolbox Snippets

March 10, 2010 Mar 10, 2010 03/10/10
Visual Studio Blog
I was spending some time responding to Connect bugs the other day when I ran across this suggestion: “It would be nice to have a clip board history window that could be next to the control toolbox as a nice utility window. (Often in presentations I see Microsoft presenters using a custom clipboard tool for such a purpose). Many times I wish...

MSBuild 4 Detailed Build Summary

March 5, 2010 Mar 5, 2010 03/5/10
Visual Studio Blog
Introduction When we were developing the current version of MSBuild, we spent a lot of time analyzing builds to determine where our performance issues lay. The standard logging, even on diagnostic verbosity and with the performance summary enabled (/clp:PerformanceSummary=true on the MSBuild command line) doesn’t give us the kind of ...

Troubleshooting Extensions with the Activity Log

February 24, 2010 Feb 24, 2010 02/24/10
Visual Studio Blog
One of the most powerful tools for troubleshooting issues that involve Visual Studio extensions is often overlooked, even though it has been around for quite some time (since VS 2005). Anyone wondering what Visual Studio is doing with their VS Package, Extension, MEF Component, or pkgdef file should ask the IDE for an activity log. In ...

Visual Studio “Tip of the Day”

February 2, 2010 Feb 2, 2010 02/2/10
Visual Studio Blog
If you like the tips and tricks we sometimes post on this blog, you might want to check out the Visual Studio Tips and Tricks blog.  It’s written by Zain Naboulsi, a Senior Developer Evangelist at Microsoft, and it’s devoted to these little productivity boosters.  We’ll continue to post the occasional tip here on the Visual Studio blog...

Tips and Tricks: Ctrl+E to Search in New Project Dialog and Extension Manager

January 21, 2010 Jan 21, 2010 01/21/10
Visual Studio Blog
Here’s a quick tip of the day for anyone who wants to quickly use the new search feature of the New Project Dialog and the Extension Manager.  You can press Ctrl+E to quickly set focus to the search box.  Did you know that this same keyboard shortcut also works in Windows Explorer, IE and other applications?  Give it a shot...

Tips and Tricks: Zooming in the VS 2010 Editor

January 7, 2010 Jan 7, 2010 01/7/10
Visual Studio Blog
You probably know that Visual Studio has an option to change your text size, but did you know you can also zoom the editor in VS 2010?  Ctrl+mouse wheel zooming has been available since the first Visual Studio 2010 CTP, but we’ve finished it by adding a zoom control and key bindings in Beta 2.  Check out this video we’ve created to ...