Bertan's Blog : Power Toys

You can now submit bugs through MSDN Forums for Visual Basic team

bertaygu — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 21:20:00 GMT

For the last couple months, I was working on a feature to enable bug reporting on MSDN Forums. Last week we have started a pilot program with Visual Basic team and enabled bug reporting on several Visual Basic forums. Bug reporting procedure is very simple and all you have to do is select "Bug Report" while create a new post under an enabled forum and Microsoft will respond to your bug similart to other bugs submitted through Microsoft Connect. We believe having bug reporting integrated in MSDN Forums will make it much easier for people to submit bugs and also it will make resolutions, workarounds to the bugs much more visible.

You can find more detailed information related to the pilot program at Visual Basic team blog.

VSCmdShell 1.2 released

bertaygu — Tue, 08 May 2007 19:35:00 GMT

I have updated VSCmdShell homepage today to include latest release. This release is our first release where all contributions are from VSCmdShell community, you can check all the included fixes at Codeplex but here is a quick summary of them:

PowerShell RTM compatibility.
VSCmdShell window does not hang when it is hidden anymore.
International character support is added for command line host.

ResEx: an editor for translating resource files

bertaygu — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 20:13:00 GMT

Jeremy found a good companion to Resource Refactoring tool to make working with localized resource files much easier. Once you created resource files using Resource Refactoring Tool, you can use ResEx to translate resource files in to different cultures. ResEx will automatically create the resource files for the new languages as you add entries. ResEx project seems to be at an early stage of development, but I had no problems with it when I tried it.

You can download ResEx at this link: http://www.papadi.gr/Default.aspx?TabId=290

Resource Refactoring Tool 1.0 Release

bertaygu — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 22:47:00 GMT

We just released Resource Refactoring Tool 1.0 to CodePlex, you can download the release from project releases page. A summary of new and updated features in this release is below, you can see the full list of fixed issues in the release page.

Added support for web application projects.
Added option to save options for future sessions. Saved options include preview changes, which instances to refactor and last used resource file.
Added interfaces that can be implemented to add new language/project support to Resource Refactoring Tool.

Resource Refactoring Tool Beta Release

bertaygu — Sat, 02 Dec 2006 00:39:00 GMT

We have finished working on the beta version of Resource Refactoring and just posted it to Codeplex. Also with this release Resource Refactoring Tool became a shared source project under MS-PL, so we have published the source code as well. If you want to help development of the tool please go to Getting Started with Development section on the project site.

New features and fixes for this release are:

ASP.Net web project support for C# and VB.Net code files. However your resource file must be located in App_GlobalResources directory otherwise no code is generated for it.
You now have the option of searching for other instances of the text you are refactoring and refactor them using the same resource entry at the same time.
We have improved the preview window to view the whole file instead of just a section of it.
An issue with items under source control is fixed.
During refactoring, shortest reference is calculated by looking at imported namespaced in the codefile.

You can read more about the tool at its Codeplex project page or download the installer directly. Also I want to thank to everyone who sent feedback during the alpha release which had been really useful.

Bookmark manager tool for Visual Studio

bertaygu — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 02:29:00 GMT

One of the ideas submitted to our team for possible power toys was to implement a document bookmark manager where users can group bookmarks by groups and access them with keyboard shortcuts. While browsing the web a while ago to find out if a similar power toy was developed, I have come across DPack from USysWare Inc. which is a free collection of tools for Visual Studio. One of the tools in the collection is a bookmark manager allowing you to group bookmarks and recall them by group numbers, you can read more about the numbered bookmark feature at their product page or download DPack from the tool homepage.

Assigning shortcut keys to add-in commands in Visual Studio

bertaygu — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 02:27:00 GMT

If you are using a Visual Studio add-in you love but you wanted to have shortcuts for its menu entries, you are not completely out of luck. Using Visual Studio options, you can add shortcut keys to any Visual Studio command including the ones created by add-ins.

In order to add a shortcuy key, you should go to Tools -> Options and choose Environment -> Keyboard pane. This pane contains a list of commands available in Visual Studio, most of the time commands have a meaningful name so you can easily search them. Below is a list of commands for some add-ins we have developed:

Microsoft.VSPowerToys.ResourceRefactor.Connect.RefactorLiteral: Opens up "Extract to Resource" dialog
Microsoft.VSPowerToys.VSCmdShell.Connect.VSCmdShellWindow: Opens up "VSCmdShell" dialog.

Once you select the command you want, you can assign it any shortcuy key you want. You can also choose the context where shortcuts will be enabled. For example for resource refactoring tool command, it will probably be best to choose "Text Editor" as the context since the command will not execute successfully in any other context.

Resource Refactoring Tool Alpha is released

bertaygu — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 00:38:00 GMT

We have just released alpha version of Resource Refactoring Tool for Visual Studio, you can download it from: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=77544. In one line, it provides an easy way to extract hard coded strings from code files to embedded resource files. You can find more details about the tool at its Codeplex page. For the alpha release, we are only releasing a binary download, but for the beta version we are going to release it as a shared source project.

If you have any feedback or suggestions please use the project discussion board.

VSCmdShell 1.1 Released

bertaygu — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 15:37:00 GMT

Yesterday, we have released a new version of VSCmdShell. This new release includes several fixes as well as some new features suggested by the community. A summary of changes are:

Better auto filename completion support
Tool window position should now be saved correctly between sessions.
Settings to change startup directory for VSCmdShell
Ability to restart VSCmdShell session without restarting Visual Studio

You can download VSCmdShell 1.1 release at CodePlex project page. If you find any bugs or if you have any suggestions please create an issue at the project page.

Building MSBee on Vista

bertaygu — Mon, 11 Sep 2006 21:21:00 GMT

Last week Joe noticed that if you want to build MSBee in Windows Vista, you have to run Visual Studio or MSBuild process under administrator priveleges. This is due to fact that build process tries to install the MSI package once it is created and as a normal user this operation fails under Windows Vista.

Resource Refactoring tool

bertaygu — Tue, 18 Jul 2006 02:29:00 GMT

Now that VSCmdShell is released, I started working on a refactoring power toy to help with converting strings in to resource files as it has to be performed manually now. It is primary feature will be to place selected string in to a resource file and replace it with the code to get that string from the resource file.

If you have any suggestions for the refactoring tool or ideas that would make it easier to work with resource files, please leave a comment to this entry.

VSCmdShell Power Toy is released

bertaygu — Sat, 15 Jul 2006 09:02:00 GMT

We just released VSCmdShell Power Toy for Visual Studio 2005 which enables you to integrate a shell window into Visual Studio IDE. You can find more information about the power toy and download it at its CodePlex project page. Some of its key features are:

Extensibility with different shells, currently Windows Command Shell (cmd.exe) and PowerShell are supported.
Ability to launch Visual Studio commands and Intellisense while typing Visual Studio commands.