Powertoys WebLog

WDriven - Use Word Templates to Integrate with TFS Server

Powertoys — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 23:40:50 GMT

WDriven is a Microsoft WORD document template integrated with Microsoft Team Foundation Server. It enables you to communicate and collaborate on Visual Studio 2005 Team System projects from within Microsoft Word.

Through VSTS Smart Tags, you can add/edit/track work items.
Tables of Items gives you an overview on all the works items referred by your documents.

WDriven doesn't impose any special format on your word documents. You can add Work Item Tracking to your existing regular doucment easily.

DotNetIdeas > Home.

Consolas - a New Font for the Visual Studio 2005 Editor

Sara Ford — Tue, 09 May 2006 20:16:00 GMT

Consolas, a cleartype font designed specifically for to make code more readable is now available for download for users of Visual Studio 2005 from the Microsoft Download Center.

Consolas is intended for use in programming environments and other circumstances where a monospaced font is specified. All characters have the same width, like old typewriters, making it a good choice for personal and business correspondence. Optimizing the font specifically for ClearType allowed a design with proportions closer to normal text than traditional monospaced fonts like Courier. This allows for more comfortable reading of extended text on-screen.

The package will change the default text face in Visual Studio to the Consolas family.

This package is only intended for licensed users of Microsoft Visual Studio 2005.

Leave any questions or comments on the VSEditor blog.

PureText 2.0 to cut out pasting to notepad

Powertoys — Fri, 31 Mar 2006 03:58:27 GMT

I downloaded this time-saving utility after reading about it in Duncan Mackenzie's blog (Removing Word's Formatting from text before pasting into .Text or other apps...). I put applications on a two-week probation period before choosing to keep them or not, but this one was an instant winner. Like Michael Swanson, I used Notepad to scrub text (Sanitize Your Clipboard Text). If Steve had a PayPal donation button, I'd use it. He has several other apps that are probably worth examining, too.

Rob Caron : PureText 2.0.

Free Wizard to Create C# Typed Collections in VS 2003

Powertoys — Mon, 20 Mar 2006 19:25:32 GMT

Via the mailbag… We used something similar to this tool when making our automation libraries for Whidbey. It comes in handy when you work with lots of collections.

Page: http://www.geekproject.com/tools.aspx#9

Description

This is a wizard for C# in Visual Studio .NET 2003 which creates custom typed collections. The wizard will generate code for the collection with options to have a an enumerator nested or not and possibility to have custom validation code.

If I had to rename this blog, what would you call it?

Sara Ford — Sat, 11 Mar 2006 01:25:00 GMT

Hi all, I’m Sara Ford, a Program Manager on the Developer Solutions team. I’m going to be helping Josh with this Power Toys blog. On my personal blog, I asked the question What sort of tools would you expect to see under “Power Toys for Visual Studio”? Another way of asking the same question is to say, if I absolutely had to rename this blog to Power Toys for ________ blog, what would go into the blank? Does Power Toys for Visual Studio make sense? Or would you like me to leave well-enough alone? =)

Feel free to leave comments or drop me a note.

Thanks for the help!

First set of Power Toys for Visual Studio released by the Developer Solutions team

Sara Ford — Thu, 09 Mar 2006 02:03:00 GMT

Check out the Developer Solutions team's blog for the latest information on Power Toys for Visual Studio.

MSBee

MSBee is an addition to MSBuild that allows you to build managed apps in VS 2005 that target .NET 1.1.

Download MSBuild Extras – Toolkit for .NET 1.1 “MSBee” Beta 1

Managed Stack Explorer

MSE is a lightweight tool for monitoring .NET 2.0 processes and stack traces. Just copy and run. No installation required.

Download Managed Stack Explorer v1.1

TFS Administration Tool

The TFS Administration Tool allows you to manage users on TFS, Sharepoint, and SQL RS through one common UI.

Download TFS Admin Tool Beta 1

HelpStudio Lite to Author Help Content in VS 2005

Powertoys — Sat, 21 Jan 2006 03:59:00 GMT

From the MSDN Forums...

The VS 2005 SDK contains a new tool for authoring Help and integrating it with VS 2005. The tool is called HelpStudio Lite. It is lightweight version of the full HelpStudio product, developed by Innovasys.

HelpStudio Lite is recommended for anyone extending VS 2005 - for example, by creating add-ins, controls, or packages. You will likely also want to author and include Help content with your extensions to VS. You can use HelpStudio Lite to author your content and compile it to the Help 2.5 (hxs) format, so it can be integrated with VS 2005.

The HelpStudio Lite documentation includes details on how to create deployment projects for your content (your hxs files). There are a couple options. One option is to use the Help Integration Wizard to create a VS setup project, which can be compiled into an Windows Installer package (msi or msm). Another option is to incorporate the InnovaHxReg tool (included with HelpStudio Lite) into your setup. You can invoke InnovaHxReg to register your content and merge it with existing VS 2005 content.

If you have existing Help 2.x files for VS 2003, you can upgrade them to work with VS 2005 by importing your collection into HelpStudio Lite and then compiling the HelpStudio Lite project. Similarly, you can import HTMLHelp 1.x (chm) files into HelpStudio Lite projects.

Here are some related links for more information.
HelpStudio Lite Press Release
Visual Studio Extensibility Center
Download the VS 2005 SDK

FlashControl to add Flash in Asp.Net 2.0

Powertoys — Sat, 14 Jan 2006 02:59:00 GMT

From the mailbag...

FlashControl is a simple way to include Flash movies in your ASP.NET 2.0 projects ! This free server control can be added in Visual Studio 2005 Toolbox so you can just drag and drop it in your aspx pages.
FlashControl manage all Flash properties (FlashVars, Loop, Menu, Scale, BgColor, SwLiveConnect, Quality, Play, Base, Align, SAlign, WMode, ...) and has full Visual Studio 2005 designer support (Smart Tag, Custom Designer, Custom Property Editor) !

With FlashControl you can target specific HTML output : Internet Explorer Windows (object tag) and/or Netscape/Mozilla, IE MAC (embed tag) or use Automatic browser detection (FlashControl will automatically choose to render object tag or embed tag depending on browser capabilities).

http://www.flash-control.net/

Treemap Visual View of Hard Drive Contents

Powertoys — Fri, 30 Dec 2005 23:41:00 GMT

Not exactly developer related, but I was having a lot of fun just seeing what's taking up so much of the space on my laptop this Holiday season. This tool is great for doing just that and a little bit of early spring cleaning.

http://www.win.tue.nl/sequoiaview/

PageMethods: Well-defined URLs for your ASP.NET sites and applications

Powertoys — Thu, 08 Dec 2005 06:45:00 GMT

Via Fabrice

PageMethods for Visual Studio 2005 has just been released. This version offers the same support as the version for VS 2003, plus some additional features.
PageMethods proposes a new code model that enables well-defined URLs and simplifies working with hyperlinks for your ASP.NET sites and applications.

PageMethods enables reliable URLs.
Linking to a web page is very easy, both in simple HTML and in ASP.NET. Linking to a page that really exists, passing the right parameters, and parsing these parameters, is a bit different.
PageMethods takes care of your URLs. It proposes a solution to define structured URLs for each of your pages, as well as a clean and simple way to call them.
The idea is based on strict page inputs and declarative parameter binding. With PageMethods, each page exposes a set of methods that represent the different ways to call the page. All you have to do to start benefiting from sharp, reliable URLs is to add methods to your pages, and mark these methods with attributes provided by PageMethods.

Here is how you would declare a page method:

[PageMethod]
protected void DisplayCustomer(int customerID)
{
...
}

Here is how you would refer to the page declaring this method:

MyHyperLink.NavigateUrl = MyPageMethods.Customers.CustomerPage.DisplayCustomer(1234);

Check out: http://metaSapiens.com/PageMethods