Sara Ford's Weblog

Under Tools – Options – Environment – Import and Export Settings , you’ll see an option called Use team settings file. The idea is that you want all the members of your team to use the same baseline set of settings.  You can provide a .vssettings...

Today is the 2nd anniversary of the CodePlex launch announcement.  I brought in some birthday cake on this nice, warm and sunny Friday afternoon in Seattle. CodePlex team members who are not currently on vacation.   We have a few who are...

Today’s tip is more like a “tip” than my usual “micro-functionality” daily tips.  After you do an export, the final page of the wizard shows you the full file path.  This is actually just a read-only edit box that has a tab stop (in other words...

On the Tools – Options – Environment – Import / Export Settings (yes, the Tools – Import / Export Dialog has its own Tools Options page), you’ll find the option where to store you current settings.  Note that you don’t get to opt out of this. ...

Sometimes, Tip of the Day isn’t about stating the obvious; it’s about stating the non-obvious.  A lot of times, there’s functionality that seems trivial on the surface, but one-off things occur at a deeper level (like yesterday’s tip).  Fortunately...

Whenever I demo Tools – Import / Export Settings, I’m usually asked what’s the difference between the Import feature and the Reset feature. From an end-user perspective, importing everything in that particular settings file is functionally the same as...

Thanks to Andy Gonzalez on the Globalization team for translating the tips into Spanish. http://blogs.msdn.com/andygon/archive/tags/VS2008Tip/default.aspx Thanks to Vitaly Zaiko on the Globalization team for translating the tips into Russian. http://blogs...

If you go to the Reset page on the Tools – Import / Export Settings Wizard , you’ll see the list of files you can reset to.  These settings files are the ones created by the VS teams.  But, let’s say that one of the default files just has some...

I’m sitting here looking at women’s swag apparel wondering how many women we have as project owners on CodePlex (or who work on CodePlex projects).  I remember talking to a handful of women at TechEd regarding CodePlex, but i don’t recall anyone...

This was tip #21, my final tip, for the TechEd VS 2008 IDE Tips and Tricks talk. If you go to Tools – Options – Environment – Keyboard and in the Show Settings For edit box, type in “Macro”, you’ll see a list of “samples” right at the top.  I wrote...

This was tip #20 in my TechEd VS 2008 IDE tips and tricks talk. When you want to do more than just edit the value of a variable, you can rewrite entire functions or create new ones in the immeidate window.  I found this especially useful when I was...

This was tip #17 in my TechEd VS 2008 IDE Tips and Tricks Talk In C#, there’s the option to remove any of your unused using statements.  This is especially helpful if you’re reusing some sort of template over and over again.  Instead of having...

This was tip #16 for my TechEd VS IDE Tips and Tricks talk. I believe this has been around since 2005, but maybe the white ‘+’ is new for 2008? When you only want to break under certain conditions, you can right-click on a breakpoint red circle (or go...

This was tip #19 in my TechEd VS 2008 IDE Tips and Tricks talk. Whenever you are debugging and want to change the contents of a variable, you can drag and drop the variable into the Watch Window .  But, you can also use data tips to change the variable...

This cracked me up this morning.  http://on365.co.uk/data-centre-content/ My personal favorites (because i’ve been known to do this) are She stops blogging in front of the TV and talks to you. The first time you used the Command Prompt in front of...

his was tip #15 in my TechEd 2008 VS IDE Tips and Tricks talk. This is a new feature for VS2008. On a given line of code where you want to log the value of a variable, you could do the old fashion way of doing a Console.Writeline() or a PrintF(). ...

This is a part of tip #12 of my TechEd 2008 IDE tips and tricks talk. Visual Studio comes with 4 window layouts: Design, Debug, Full Screen Mode, and File mode.  My guess is that file mode is the least used, since you can only enter it by opening...

Today’s tip was a part of tip #8 from my TechEd 2008 IDE Tips and Tricks talk on using Visual Studio Commands from the command window and the find combo box. In the standard command bar, you’ll see the Find Combo Box right next to Find in Files. ...

This was tip #7 from my TechEd 2008 VS IDE Tips and Tricks.  A few months ago, I had dinner with Alan Stevens, Chris Woodruff, and a few others who were creating one of the Microsoft certification exams.  One of the developers said, “hey sara...

Thanks to everyone who attended my talks on Friday.  Wow.  What a great turnout and response!  I really appreciate the kind words.  Charlie Calvert and I worked so hard this past month to get the talk ready.  I’m so happy to see...

Oh boy… i’m doing 2 talks at TechEd today!  One is the big Visual Studio 2008 IDE Tips and Tricks talk (repeat from Charlie’s talk on Tuesday), and the VS Tip of the Day.  Hope i’m doing well out there.  =D  All i can say is that as...

Tuesday’s tip discussed how to reset your settings, but maybe you don’t remember what you picked during the first launch of VS, or if you’ve done a reset since then. Under the HKEY_CURRENT_USER\ Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\Profile key, you’ll...

Of all the pieces of UI in Visual Studio, I think these two options confuse me the most.   I keep forgetting what the difference is, but at least now, I have them written down for the rest of time, Internet-willing. I’m referring to these two...

Today, Charlie is doing the Visual Studio 2008 IDE Tips and Tricks talk at TechEd, hence why Import Export Settings is today’s tip.  I’m doing the repeat talk on Friday, so wish us both good luck! The Tools – Import / Export Settings feature will...

In an earlier tip, I discussed how you can navigate forward and backward with the Alt+Minus and Shift+Alt+Minus keyboard shortcuts, which are scoped specifically to the Object Browser.  But there are two other commands View.Forward and View.Backward...