Sara Ford's Weblog

For leap year, we’re going to leap all the way back to Visual C++ 2.0. When I started collecting tips for tip of the day, Rico and I shared an office wall, so he forwarded me his list of tips for Visual C++ 2.0.  Of course, having never used VC+...

Since the default is to have the Track Active Item in Solution Explorer enabled in the General Development Settings, the more appropriate tip is either how to turn it back on or to how to turn it off. On the Tools – Options – Projects and Solutions –...

Since today is the launch, I had to pick something huge about Visual Studio 2008. Scott Guthrie has an excellent write-up on Multi-Targeting Support that I dare not even attempt to summarize on this blog, but I’ll repost Scott’s description of what’s...

In the General Development Settings, the Error List will be shown (whether it is auto-hiding or just closed) whenever a build fails with errors.  If you like to drive what you need to fix using just the Output window (since you can double-click on...

If you need to create small projects to try things out, or not sure how you want to setup things before you save, there’s a tools options for this.  With this option enabled, the New Project Dialog Location and other fields will be gone.  In...

In the solution explorer, you can group projects inside of solution folders to improve the manageability of solutions that contain a large number of projects. With focus on the Solution node in the solution explorer, you’ll notice the Add New Solution...

Sometimes, you might find yourself in a state where the solution is not shown.  For example, some of the default environment settings have this enabled, like the Visual Basic Development Settings. If you find yourself in this state and want the solution...

Back in my power toy days, Matt Manela was a developer intern on our team, which you might remember from this post about writing a custom Visual Studio editor .  Well, he came back full time last fall, and was just recently featured on .NET Rocks...

It is amazing how many times I’ve pulled up on the New Project Dialog in my lifetime and never noticed the Small / Large icons buttons in the upper right hand side. Okay, be honest, how long have you been using Visual Studio and are just now noticing...

Thanks to all for playing the Pop Quiz.  I’ve approved all comments, so you can read through the list.  Some were quite funny, and i always appreciate a good laugh. Congrats to Programmerman at http://www.programmerman.net/ for being the first...

In the new project dialog, you can change the default new project location. The option to do so lives in Tools – Options – Projects and Solutions – General Technorati Tags: VS2005Tip , VS2008Tip

ust like last time we did a pop quiz, you can leave your answer as a comment, and i’ll approve all comments the next afternoon.  In the picture above, you see ‘x’ marks the spot.  If you click the mouse pointer there, it will toggle the state...

Today’s tip falls into the "you can do… what!? " category.  Open your primary solution (the solution you want to add another solution to) Go to File – Add – Add Existing Project Change “Files of type” to Solution Files Select the sln file...

I’ve been coming up with little songs to keep sane as I post a daily tip for Visual Studio.  Beth Massi swears she’ll catch me on tape singing these one day.  One of them is to the tune of Dunkin’ Donuts (i think it’s their jingle) of "gotta...

We used to tease the tester who owned testing this auto-recovery feature that every time there was a power failure in the building (due to a storm, etc), he was standing near some big red switch in the off position with a big grin on his face, because...

wow… 150 tips.  And just like the Energizer bunny , Tip of the Day keeps going and going and going… Continuing with yesterday’s Watch Window tip , the debug tool windows (locals, autos, and watch window) have a context menu that includes the "hexadecimal...

That’s why our Sensei and many other high-ranking black belts said to me last night.  I torn my shoulder in Jan 07, then broke my leg in May 07, spending the entire summer on crutches.  The irony is that we won a world karate tournament back...

And now for something a little different… Ever been debugging some code and wanted to quickly change a variable’s value without having to stop debugging?  Here’s what to do… Add the value to the watch window (You can select the variable and drag...

The output window has a drop down, as shown below, to move between various outputs views (or panes), like Debug and Build.  There’s a command called Window.NextSubPane that you can use to jump to the next output pane. The command in itself isn’t...

Whenever tools windows are "tabbed docked" together, they form a little group that you can move around and such, as we’ve seen in previous tips. You can use Ctrl+PgUp and Ctrl+PgDn to navigate among these tool windows in this group. Technorati...

Hmm, interesting how I got myself onto a "F6" theme this week…  In what seriously feels like a lifetime ago (or at least Tip of the Day’s lifetime ago), one of our first tips was on how to split windows .  There’s a funny story about...

And in keeping with the theme of the week, if you don’t want the IDE Navigator to appear when you navigate among various opened tool windows, use Alt+F6 and Alt+Shift+F6 to go to the next and previous tool windows, in most-recently used sort order. Technorati...

Thanks to Keith Elder for doing the lion’s share of the work in putting together the Geek Dinner Monday night.  Keith has a great write-up, which i’ll just point everyone to. http://keithelder.net/blog/archive/2008/02/05/Geek-Dinner-Pictures-and...

Happy Mardi Gras y’all from New Orleans!!  Laissez les bons temps rouler encore a Nouvelle Orleans! Similar to Ctrl+Tab functionality, Ctrl+F6 and Ctrl+Shift+F6 allow you to navigate to the previous and next opened documents, based on a most-recently...

Yesterday’s tip re: closing a tool window via the keyboard made me triple-check my notes that I never had a tip on how to close the current document.  If you are using the general development settings, the command Window.CloseDocumentWindow is bound...