Covers Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2005, 2008, and 2010

by Zain Naboulsi and Sara Ford

Microsoft Press

Foreword Visual Studio is quite possibly the most powerful and comprehensive software development suite available. No matter your discipline—developer, test, architect, etc.—Visual Studio pro- vides the tools you need to help get your job done. However, Visual Studio handles such a large number of development tasks for so many platforms that learning it can be an overwhelming process. Many learn just enough to solve the problem at hand but don’t delve deep enough to unearth the gems that enable real productivity. Visual Studio contains numerous features and options that can help you perform your tasks more effectively. Some are prominently advertised, but many of the real time-savers are bur- ied in obscure dialog boxes and triggered with arcane keyboard shortcuts. While most of this information can be learned by wading through hundreds of pages of documentation, many of the more powerful features are yet undocumented. How can we possibly navigate

(2011)

eBook €26.00

by Sara Ford

Microsoft Press

Chapter 4 Manage Your Environment Layout 99 Invoking program.cs from the command prompt opens Visual Studio in this file window layout. You’ll note in the following image that there are no tool windows showing and the Text Editor toolbar is showing. This is the default view in the General Development Settings. You can make any customizations here and they’ll persist across window layout states. (This means that if you open a project, all the tool windows will pop back. This happens because you’re now in design mode.) Your customizations will be persisted across sessions. Whenever you shut down Visual Studio, these customizations are saved to disk. They are also saved as a part of your .vssettings file (Tools–Import And Export Settings). Toolbars and Context Menus It is common for users to want to tweak every aspect of their IDE, including removing any unwanted commands from their context menus or reducing

(2009)

eBook €19.00