Sara Ford's Weblog

I met with my team’s automation experts a few weeks back to get their input on when to automate and when to manually test. The general rule of thumb has always been to use common sense. If you’re only going to run the test one or two times or the test...

Update 12/2/2004:  Uploaded an image from Visual Studio 2005 Beta.  Note the image below shows guidelines at column numbers 5 and 30, but the regkey value is RBG(255,0,0), 4, 29.  The Guideline column numbers are 0-based in the registry...

Update:  You can watch the video of my TechDays Belgium presentation at http://www.microsoft.com/belux/techdays/2010/videos.aspx . Just search for "Sara Ford" as the speaker. Update: I’ve updated the Visual Studio Tips Advance section for...

This tip is new for Visual Studio 2008. You can learn more about extension methods in the documentation for both Visual Basic and C#. In the Object Browser Settings, you’ll see the Show Extension Methods option. Now, when you have an extension method...

Thanks for coming to today’s session! As I’ve said (or about to say), don’t take notes! Here are all the tips for you. Just sit back, relax, and enjoy the show! 0. Know your Keybindings! All these are in the General Development Settings. Searching 1....

Another awesome hidden editor feature… You can customize your Find in Files results to show what you want to see and how you want to see it. Example:  You don’t want to view the entire file path shown in the Find Results tool window. Find all "using"...

A very big thank you to Henrik Stuart for writing this VS Editor Zoom control and updating it for Whidbey. I’ve zipped together some quick downloads of the control for Whidbey and Visual Studio .NET 2003 that you can find on the site. Henrik will receive...

Definitions I’ve seen the terms “Test Plan” and “Test Specification” mean slightly different things over the years. In a formal sense (at this given point in time for me), we can define the terms as follows: Test Specification – a detailed summary of...

Update 7/20 @ 11:53pm: We have a bug:  Please vote and leave your suggestions / feedback at http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/ProductFeedback/viewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackId=cf3597fc-2acf-43c7-b09f-a7e1dd7474f5   Many thanks ShadowChaser! Update 7...

Today’s post marks the 100th Tip on the Tip of the Week!  To celebrate the occasion, let’s recap our top 10 most visited* tips. #10 – How to bind Keyboard Shortcuts to commands #9 – How to do column selection #8 – What C# books to read #7 – How to...

With four people in my office chanting “Do it! Do it!” I pressed the send button. Last Friday afternoon, I forwarded the Business Week article to Bill Gates. I highlighted the first sentence of the article that mentioned my name and my blog, and, most...

This tip will work for both Visual Studio .NET 2003 and Visual Studio 2005. I use this feature all the time. These commands will comment / uncomment the current line if there is no selection. Based on the feedback and comments, it seems that people like...

Giving a presentation? Want to focus just on the editor (and any interesting tools windows) without modifying your basic (design) view of Visual Studio? Press Shift+Alt+Enter (or View – Full Screen) to enter full screen mode. Whatever happens in Full...

was going to start this blog entry off with the definition of Irony, but the more I read about it, the less this felt like Irony and more like Coincidence. We’ll just pretend I never read the definition of Irony. Oh the Irony! I’m on tip #328 and just...

Today’s tip of the day comes from Shawn’s post on the Find Combo Box . These tips will work on both Visual Studio .NET 2003 and Visual Studio 2005. Goto a line – type the line number and press Ctrl-G Goto a file – type the name of the file and press Ctrl...

The Developer Solutions team (the team I joined 4 weeks ago) is proud to announce the release of MSBuild Extras – Toolkit for .NET 1.1 “MSBee.”  MSBee is an addition to MSBuild that allows developers to build managed applications in Visual Studio...

Dylan , one of our editor devs, has posted some workarounds to Emacs and Brief Emulations bugs on GotDotNet. The Brief Emulation Add-in addresses the following issues: Bug FDBK38309 :  BRIEF editor emulation for cut with no selection incorrect ...

Let me remind you to view my disclaimer if you haven’t already. These are my thoughts as I sit here on a Tuesday evening watching T.V., and I reserve the right to change my mind on how I view things at any time. Most likely, my thoughts will have...

For many years, we’ve been writing helpful little tools for Visual Studio called PowerToys. The history has been that we design and write these tools internally, and then share out to the community. Now we want to take it up a notch and work directly...

These postings are provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights. The content of this site are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in anyway. In addition, my thoughts and opinions often change, and as a weblog...

Consider this article your one-stop shop for all things IAccessible. Below is a summary of the most important topics under my accessibility category. Getting Started New to Accessibility? So was I three years ago. Get caught-up by reading my MSDN whitepaper...

I’ve been thinking about doing an Editor tip of the day RSS feed for a while now. My goal is to see how many consecutive work days I can post a “Did you know” without forgetting. The rules are I have to post at least one tip per work day, unless I know...

Today’s tip comes from “some cool dev” who wrote the new Window Management features for Visual Studio 2005.  At the end of the File Tab Channel, there’s a drop-down arrow and a close ‘x’ button.  If you press the drop-down arrow, you’ll get...

You’ve may have noticed that sometimes your project name is too long where other times it is accepted in the New Project Dialog.  As explained by Paul on the Visual Studio General Forums … The OS limit is 260 characters (MAX_PATH).  However...

I want to get a sense of how many people use Visual Studio with a mulit-monitor display.  I’ve seen some feedback in my blog comments requesting that we add a feature to drag a code file onto the secondary monitor.  Currently, in order to have...