Paul Cornell : Visual Studio 2005

Snippy Makes Writing IntelliSense Code Snippets Easier

Paul Cornell [MSFT] — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 20:48:00 GMT

Check out Snippy. It's a tool that makes writing IntelliSense code snippets for Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 easier. (Thanks to a customer who pointed me to this!)

-- Paul

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This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

3-Minute Video: How to Create a New IntelliSense Code Snippet

Paul Cornell [MSFT] — Mon, 24 Apr 2006 07:27:00 GMT

Attached to this blog post is a video that I created that demonstrates how to create a new IntelliSense code snippet using Microsoft Visual Studio 2005. The video is 3 minutes, 11 seconds in length. The file size is 2.9 MB. Enjoy!

-- Paul

P.S. I'm interested in your feedback on these videos. I'm thinking about whether this is something to proceed with for upcoming versions of Visual Studio documentation. Do you like the presentation format? What about the file format? The video lengths? These videos aren't professionally produced - does that concern you? What other videos would you like to see in the 1-minute, 3-minute, or 5-minute ranges? Your feedback is important to helping shape to what degree this effort goes ahead, and if so, in what direction.

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This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

1-Minute Video: How to Use the Code Snippets Manager

Paul Cornell [MSFT] — Mon, 24 Apr 2006 07:24:00 GMT

Attached to this blog post is a video that I created that demonstrates how to use the Code Snippets Manager using Microsoft Visual Studio 2005. The video is 1 minute, 23 seconds in length. The file size is 1.3 MB. Enjoy!

-- Paul

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This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

2-Minute Video: How to Insert an IntelliSense Code Snippet

Paul Cornell [MSFT] — Mon, 24 Apr 2006 07:12:00 GMT

Attached to this blog post is a video that I created that demonstrates how to insert an IntelliSense code snippet using Microsoft Visual Studio 2005. The video is 2 minutes in length. The file size is 1.7 MB. (See if you can catch the typo in my video: "Hello Word.snippet" instead of "Hello World.snippet" <grin>.) Enjoy!

-- Paul

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This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

Your Feedback Wanted to Improve Visual Studio Help

Paul Cornell [MSFT] — Sun, 16 Apr 2006 01:59:00 GMT

Last week, I asked several customers who were visiting Microsoft to give me some feedback on the Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 documentation and the Visual Studio 2005 SDK documentation. I'd like to give you the opportunity to participate also -- simply add a comment to this blog post containing your responses. Here are the four questions that I asked them:

If you use Visual Studio 2005, if you could vote for only *two* of the following types of Help pages/topics for us to improve in the documentation for future Visual Studio versions, what would they be?

More "Getting Started" or "Essentials" pages
More "Guided Tour" pages
More "How To" pages
More end-to-end "Walkthrough" pages
Deeper architectural coverage
More "Best Practices" pages

If you use the Visual Studio 2005 SDK to customize or extend Visual Studio 2005, and if you could vote for only *four* of the following areas for us to improve the documentation in future Visual Studio SDK releases, what would they be?

VSPackages
Services
Menu and Toolbar Extensibility
Tool Window Extensibility
Project Extensibility
Language Integration
Editor Extensibility
Debugging Extensibility
Help Integration and Extensibility (including HelpStudio Lite docs)
Source Code Control Extensibility
Testing Solutions and Testing Extensibility
Data Designer Extensibility
System Definition Model (SDM) Extensibility
Solution Deployment
Team Foundation Server (TFS) Extensibility
Visual Studio Tools for Applications (VSTA)
Domain-Specific Language (DSL) Tools

Is there anything in the Visual Studio 2005 Help or Visual Studio 2005 SDK Help that you really like and you want us to continue investing our time in for future Visual Studio versions?
If you could see just *one* thing added to, changed, or removed from the Visual Studio documentation or Visual Studio SDK documentation, what would it be?

-- Paul

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This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

Visual Studio Macro for Replacing Text in a File

Paul Cornell [MSFT] — Sat, 18 Mar 2006 17:39:00 GMT

Recently, I used Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 to edit a set of HTML files. As I began to search and replace the same text over and over in these files, I realized that I could do it faster with a macro. To be honest, I had only used Visual Studio macros once or twice before, so I wasn't certain about the specific code that I needed to write to make it happen. Using my prior knowledge of the Microsoft .NET base class library's System.IO.File class and the Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications library's String class, I was able to easily figure this out:

Sub ReplaceHTML()

Dim doc As TextDocument
doc = DTE.ActiveDocument.Object

With doc

            .ReplacePattern("hiddenScrollOffset"">", _
                "hiddenScrollOffset""/>")
            .ReplacePattern("VsPackage", "VSPackage", _
                EnvDTE.vsFindOptions.vsFindOptionsMatchCase)
            .ReplacePattern("Walkthru:", "Walkthrough: ")
            .ReplacePattern("i.e.", "for example")
            .ReplacePattern("etc.", "and so on")

End With

End Sub

-- Paul

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This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

Using Visual Studio to Edit Web Pages

Paul Cornell [MSFT] — Tue, 07 Mar 2006 19:32:00 GMT

I am currently involved in a project that requires me to edit a lot of Web pages. I haven't really used Microsoft Visual Studio to edit Web pages - I've generally used Microsoft FrontPage for that. So I thought I'd give Visual Studio 2005 a try. Before I started, I turned to our documentation to get a quick orientation. Here are a few of the Help topics that I used:

Getting Started — HTML Editing in Visual Studio. This topic provides links to various HTML editing topics, such as how to do CSS editing

Walkthrough: Basic HTML Editing in Visual Web Developer. I learned in this topic more about how to navigate between elements and use the Document Outline window.

Web Page Designer Keyboard Shortcuts. I learned that CTRL+SHIFT+W displays my Web page in my default browser. You can of course also simply right-click the page and click the menu command to show the page in the default browser, but I prefer to use the keyboard when I can.

I hope you find these resources useful if you haven't yet used Visual Studio to work with Web pages and are thinking of giving it a try. So far, I'm enjoying using Visual Studio to edit Web pages.

-- Paul

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This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

The Visual Studio 2005 Image Library

Paul Cornell [MSFT] — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 21:23:00 GMT

I've noticed several customers asking about the Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Image Library, which is a collection of application images that appear in Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Visual Studio, and other Microsoft software. You can use this set of over 1,000 images to create applications that look visually consistent with Microsoft software.

More information is available in the Visual Studio 2005 Image Library Help topic. This Help topic also includes a pointer to how to install the Visual Studio 2005 Image Library.

By the way, when you register your copy of Visual Studio 2005, depending on the product edition that you register, your benefits may include the Corbis Image Pack -- an assortment of 250 royalty-free images from Corbis for inclusion in your Web sites and applications; and IconBuffet Studio Edition Icon Suite -- a collection of over 100 professional, royalty-free stock icons from IconBuffet.com. To register your copy of Visual Studio 2005, on the Help menu, click Register Product.

-- Paul

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This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

Customizing and Extending Visual Studio

Paul Cornell [MSFT] — Mon, 23 Jan 2006 21:37:00 GMT

There are lots of ways to customize and extend Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 to help you be more efficient and productive as you create solutions and tools for yourself and others.

When we discuss customizing Visual Studio, we generally refer to changing the overall behavior of existing features built in to Visual Studio. For example, you can do things like customize how shortcut keys are bound to Visual Studio commands or show or hide Visual Studio toolbars and windows. Documentation for customizing Visual Studio 2005 is included with the product.

When we discuss extending Visual Studio, we generally refer to three areas: macros, add-ins and wizards, and advanced integration.

Generally speaking, macros allow you to manipulate Visual Studio programmatically to perform routine or repetitive tasks. For example, you could record macro code that executes a series of keystrokes repeatedly.

Add-ins and wizards also allow you to manipulate Visual Studio, but in a way more tightly integrated into the visual Studio integrated development environment (IDE). Add-ins can appear as menu commands and buttons in the IDE, and they are compiled, so they protect your intellectual property. Unlike macros, add-ins and wizards run in-process with Visual Studio, giving them access to more automation functionality such as build automation or adding custom pages to the Tools Options dialog box.

Documentation for using automation and creating macros, add-ins, and wizards for Visual Studio 2005 is also included with the product.

For advanced Visual Studio 2005 integration, such as integrating new programming languages, custom code editors and solution designers, new solution project types, custom code debuggers, and custom productivity tools, you should consult the Visual Studio 2005 SDK.

Note that Visual Studio 2005 editions support extensibility features in different ways. For more information, see the "Extensibility" section of the Visual Studio 2005 Product Line Overview.

Resources:

-- Paul

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This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

Introducing Starter Kits

Paul Cornell [MSFT] — Thu, 19 Jan 2006 08:13:00 GMT

New for Microsoft Visual Studio 2005, Starter Kits are enhanced project templates that can be shared with other members of the community. A Starter Kit includes code samples that compile, documentation, and other helpful resources to enable you to learn new tools and programming techniques while building useful, real world applications.

Creating a Starter Kit is fundamentally the same as creating a normal project template, the only difference being that a Starter Kit contains documentation files that are set to open when a project based on the Starter Kit is created.

Resources:

-- Paul

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This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

Taking Shortcuts

Paul Cornell [MSFT] — Tue, 17 Jan 2006 06:09:00 GMT

I was building an application in C# this evening, but when I pressed the CTRL + B shortcut key combination expecting to build it, nothing happened. That's because different Microsoft Visual Studio supports different shortcut key mapping schemes. For example, to build in Microsoft Visual C# 2005 Express Edition, you press F6. In Microsoft Visual Basic 2005 Express Edition, you press ALT + B, U.

Many Visual Studio 2005 editions, such as Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite, include seven shortcut key mapping schemes. For example, you could code in C#, yet if you're used to Visual Basic shortcut keys, you could apply the Visual Basic default shortcut key mapping scheme and use those shortcut keys instead. For a list of these shortcut key mappings and how to use them, see Shortcut Keys and How to: Work with Shortcut Key Combinations.

How to: List Current Keyboard Shortcut Mappings describes a macro that generates a list of all the commands in the integrated development environment (IDE) and any shortcut keys mapped to those commands according to the current keyboard mapping scheme.

-- Paul

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This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

What is MSBuild?

Paul Cornell [MSFT] — Wed, 11 Jan 2006 20:58:00 GMT

MSBuild is the new extensible, XML-based build engine that is included with Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 and the .NET Framework 2.0. MSBuild introduces a new XML-based project file format that is straightforward to understand and extend, and is fully supported by Microsoft. Learn more about MSBuild items, properties, tasks, and targets in the MSBuild Overview. Experiment by writing a simple MSBuild project by following the steps in How To: Write a Simple MSBuild Project.

-- Paul

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This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.