Sara Ford's Weblog

Under Tools – Options – Projects And Solutions – Build And Run , there’s the Maximum Number Of Parallel Project Builds edit box. Try as you might, this will never work on non-VC projects. Makes me wonder why the label doesn’t just say Visual C++ projects...

Reshmi, a SDET on the Web Development Tools team, is running a new Tips and Tricks blog for ASP.NET, IIS, and Visual Web Developer tips. This is great to see, since I constantly get Visual Web Developer questions that I can’t answer. http://blogs.msdn...

Ahh, finally, back to one of the IDE feature areas I used to test – Projects and Solutions! And no other better way to start than a Tools Options series… You can figure at a global level, across all languages (VB, VC, and C# are the ones i’ve tested)...

Sara Aside: Matt and I were IM’ing each other this morning, and he congratulated me for the book being sent to printing yesterday. He asked me if I planned to sleep with it like a stuff animal. I said of course I was going to.. One of the hardest things...

And last but not least, there was the HTML Visualizer… And your HTML appears as it would in a browser. Technorati Tags: VS2005Tip , VS2008Tip

Let’s say you have a more interesting string that contains xml, say one of the code snippet files. You can still use the Text Visualizer to view the xml, but that’s not very exciting. If you select the XML Visualizer, then you get the xml syntax highlighting...

At the bottom of the Text Visualizer dialog box, there’s the option to toggle word wrap, to give you the true notepad experience. when unchecked, you get the data going straight across the dialog box Technorati Tags: VS2005Tip , VS2008Tip

Let’s say you have a long string, maybe a SQL connection string or just some tabular data (or data separated by a space as shown below), and you need to view the entire string. Of course, you could cut and paste into notepad to view the contents, but...

Last week, my career-long dream of becoming an international speaker came true. I had the opportunity to speak at ReMix08 UK in Brighton, England. Thanks to Dave Sussman and Phil Winstanley, who ran the Community Track session, for inviting me out to...

If you just quickly want to know what exception has been caught, without having to figure out the variable name of the exception in the try catch, you can just type in $exception in the watch window. Technorati Tags: VS2005Tip , VS2008Tip

If you start the debugger (F5) for a console application, and you don’t have a Stop / Debugger.Break() or some sort of Console.Read() method, the console application window will appear and disappear in a flash. However, if you start the console application...

It’s times like these i wish i lived closer to home to help promote local events and activities. But for now, blogging will have to do, even if it is from a speaker room in England The MSDN Southern Fried Roadshow is coming to Hattiesburg, Mississippi...

I’ve always wondered this, but finally took the time to ask Dustin Campbell when I met with him last week for Debugger tips. The autos window shows the current statement and the previous statement.   it was always the previous statement that threw...

Today marks my 7th (!) year at Microsoft. Wow. To have only known about this back in the day… hopefully this brings someone the joy I missed out on. Sometimes you’re debugging and VS doesn’t know where the source file is located. VS prompts you with the...

I’m speaking at ReMix on Thursday in England, where I will demo the new Subversion client support for CodePlex .  I will also present the Visual Studio IDE Tips and Tricks. http://www.microsoft.com/uk/remix08/ Well, i’m off to catch my flight. i...

Whenever you open a DataTip for an instance of an object, you’ll see the Make Object ID item in the context menu. If you click on Make Object ID, you’ll see {1#} get added to the contents of the variable. and it will also show up in the Watch, Autos or...

If you are using VB, you can add the keyword Stop in your code to suspend execution. The Stop statement is the equivalent to adding a breakpoint. Sometimes it is just faster to type “Stop” than it is to remember to hit F9 or reach for the mouse. If you...

I just noticed how the tooltip for the Start icon changes from Debug.Start (F5) to Continue (F5) Well, this got me thinking, “Of course it makes sense to have the same keyboard shortcut for both commands.” Then I wondered what the command was for Continue...

“All mixed up you don’t know what to do… Next thing you turn around and find the person is you…” with apologies to the band 311 . I recall learning Step Out once I got to the Visual Studio team. Again, it was a glorious moment. Suppose you are within...

Back in my Visual J++ days, I didn’t know about F11. To compensate, I would set a breakpoint within the function I wanted to step into, and then when the Show Next Statement arrow was on the line, I would press F5 to run to the next breakpoint. I can...

For those who haven’t memorized these keyboard shortcuts yet, here you go. This tips is in case you only know about F11, and you don’t want to step into a function every time. On the Debug Toolbar, you’ll find the icon showing an arrow jumping over several...

I never paid any attention to this command until I start writing this tip. I’m sure i’ve used it before, but it was quite a while ago. On the Debug toolbar, you’ll find a yellow arrow for the Debug.ShowNextStatement command. The keyboard shortcut is Alt...

Whenever you execute the QuickWatch command with a variable selected in the editor or you type in something into the QuickWatch expression combo box, those variables are saved in the combo box drop down list. Technorati Tags: VS2005Tip , VS2008Tip

On the Quick Watch window, there’s a button to add a variable to the Watch window. Pressing this button will display the variable in the Watch window as shown below. Technorati Tags: VS2005Tip , VS2008Tip

In the QuickWatch window, you can use the Expression combo box to type in an expression. Then press Reevaluate to calculate the expression. Pressing Reevaluate sets the new values of msg, as shown below. Technorati Tags: VS2005Tip , VS2008Tip