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 an “I love Visual Studio Core” t-shirt. I’ll post a picture as soon as the shirts come in.
Got a suggestion for a VS Core Community PowerToy? Want to help us write PowerToys? Let me know!
Many people have contacted me about the Visual Studio Core Community Powertoys site missing content. I appologize for that and i’m working to get it resolved asap. In the meantime, you can find the Visual Studio .NET 2003 powertoys here.
If you want to view the latest powertoys for Visual Studio .NET 2003, check out the Powertoys Blog VS 2003 category.
Original Powertoys for Visual Studio .NET 2003
VB Commenter
Download – Workspace
Add XML comments to your VB .Net code easily and have them extracted into an XML comment file at build time. More…
VSWindowManager
Download : Workspace
Design custom window layouts that you can store and recall from the Windows menu. Automatically switch from code to design layouts as well! More…
OnlineSearch
Download : Workspace
OnlineSearch is a tool that will let you search the internet from within the text editor of Visual Studio .NET 2003. More…
Control Outline
Download : Workspace
The Control Outline PowerToy is an add-in that adds a tool window to the IDE allowing the developer to see a hierarchical representation of the controls layed out on the Windows Forms design surface. More…
VSMouseBindings
Download : Workspace
You have a 5 button mouse, why not be able to assign all five mouse buttons to commands within visual studio? More…
VSTweak
Download : Workspace
Use custom file extensions in VS, edit your command window aliases, MRU list control, edit debugger output for classes, and More…
VSEdit
Download : Workspace
Load a file, or a set of files, into a currently running instance of Visual Studio .NET 2003. No more extra windows opening, just pure editing bliss. More…
Custom Help Builder
Download : Workspace
Create a custom help collection for your XML-style commented VB or C# class libraries. Your custom help will be fully integrated into Visual Studio .NET 2003, so your topics will be accessible from Dynamic Help, F1, Search, Help Index, and Help Contents. More…
VSCMDShell Window
Download : Workspace
Alpha Quality Warning! – Access to the command shell CMD.exe and the Visual Studio commands from the same window.
Happy Mardi Gras to everyone back home enjoying their 4-day weekend and to those of us far away from the parade routes. Back in the New Orleans – Mississippi Gulf Coast area, we get Lundi (Monday) and Mardi Gras holidays. My tradition since moving to Seattle is to wear my LSU t-shirt (I was a Miss State grad) and my “best” mardi gras beads on Mardi Gras. I love the looks people give me for wearing my beads – I think they think I don’t realize these are costume jewelry, b/c I’m wearing them at work.
Tonight, we’re hosting a small Hurricane party. Thanks Mom and Dad for the Hurricane glasses and mixes. Can’t wait to eat me some king cake tonight. Hmm, perhaps I’ll put a baby in each slice for the Mardi Gras newbies… =)
Note: a “king cake baby” is an inch-long plastic baby that is placed into a king cake from the bottom. The person who gets the baby in their slice of king cake has to buy the next king cake for the group. The first time I told someone up here in Seattle to be careful because the king cake has a baby in it, it was a traumatic experience for both of us =)
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 is really expensive to automation, it is most likely a manual test. But then again, what good is saying “use common sense” when you need to come up with deterministic set of guidelines on how and when to automate?
Pros of Automation
Cons of Automation
Pros of Manual
Cons of Manual
Other deciding factors
Criteria for automating
There are two sets of questions to determine whether automation is right for your test case:
Is this test scenario automatable?
How important is this test scenario?
If you answered #1 to both questions – definitely automate that test
If you answered #1 or #2 to both questions – you should automate that test
If you answered #2 to both questions – you need to consider if it is really worth the investment to automate
What happens if you can’t automate?
Let’s say that you have a test that you absolutely need to run whenever possible, but it isn’t possible to automate. Your options are
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 with you to write these tools for the Visual Studio 2005 release. If you haven’t checked out VS 2005 yet, what are you waiting for? =) We want your feedback at Day 0 on how you want the tool to work, look, and feel. And we want your help in the tool’s production by contributing to the source code. We’re here to write tools for you, with you.
Okay, that’s my attempt at marketing. I know where my marketing skills stand. =) Just ask me about my little high school business “Squirt <comma> the Clown”, but that’s another story not to be told at any time… We just thought it would be a cool idea to try working more closely with customers in creating PowerToys, and what better way to work more closely than to participate in the design and in the production of the Powertoy with you.
Josh has given me his gotdotnet team’s website for this program, so you’ll find more information and details at
Visual Studio Core Community PowerToys
My vision is that this site will become a home page for the VS Core Team, including links to PowerToys we ship, the Nightly scenarios we’re posting on the web for review, links to team blogs, and so on and so forth.
I currently have 2 project ideas that we can start designing. If interested, sign up on the workspace. If you have strong feelings about one tool over the other, let me know. My personal bias is towards the VS Editor Zoom control, because I’ve wanted an easy way to increase the font size during presentations or code reviews.
Update 2/8/2005 - fixed the link for the VS Editor Zoom workspace.
Let me know if you have any suggestions or ideas for PowerToys. The ideas do not have to be restricted to add-ins or macros. So, if you know of a cool tool for running outside VS, let me know your ideas.
And lastly, when either of these two tools “ship” (that is, the workspace owner declares it completed), those who contributed source code will receive an “I love Visual Studio Core” t-shirt as a thank-you from the team.
By popular demand, I asked Josh about doing a live video segment of Maddog to bring to live the Maddog concepts ScottGu had posted about one Friday morning. That afternoon, Josh shot these videos of what was supposed to be me teaching Marie the basics of software testing in DevDiv, but I looked at the camera a little too much instead of at her (my rational was that I was responding to Sheeshers request to hear more about testing activities). And, I promise I talk much slower in person, when I’m not nervous – It’s a N’awlins thing. =)
The first three videos are
Introduction to DevDiv’s Test Case Management System (Part 1)
Investigating a test case failure in the lab (Maddog Part 2)
Analyzing a Test Case Failure (Maddog Part 3)
There’s a fourth video (in my opinion, it’s the best of the 4 videos) along the lines of The Proper Steps to Logging a Bug, including finding the exact repro (minimizing the repro steps), including a good title, and searching for duplicates. I’ll let you know when Josh posts it.
update: The video has been updated at http://download.microsoft.com/download/0/8/d/08d8ebd7-a2d4-442e-abb8-8a0eae19f120/josh_ledgard_05_tour_devdiv_logabug.wmv, but it just doesn’t have a blog entry at Channel 9 yet.