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Tips and Tricks - Visual Studio Blog

Visual Studio Hidden Gems

July 29, 2016 Jul 29, 2016 07/29/16
Visual Studio Blog
Visual Studio is a powerful IDE with hundreds of productivity features to empower developers to do more, faster. I joined the Visual Studio team about a year ago, and here are some of the great things I’ve discovered. These are all in Visual Studio 2015, and some have been there for a few versions now so you’ll find them in previous ...

Debugging Tips and Tricks

May 22, 2015 May 22, 2015 05/22/15
Visual Studio Blog
Unfortunately bugs are a part of software development, and despite our best efforts to write software correctly from the start we spend a lot of time in the debugger. While bugs are an unfortunate fact of life, finding them doesn’t have to be as painful as it often is. For you problem-solvers out there, the Visual Studio 2015 debugger ...

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) (image) After (VS 2010) (image) 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.  ...

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 ...