You can quickly change the editor background to black by going to Tools Options Environment Fonts & Colors. Make sure that “Show Settings For” is on Text Editor and the Plain Text is selected in “Display Items”. Change item foreground from Default (Automatic) to White and change the item background from Default (Automatic) to Black.

Happy Editing!

Just completed a Find in Files or a Find Symbol and want to navigate quickly between the results? In the default keyboard scheme, F8 allows you to navigate through the results in the Find Results Windows, Find Symbol Results, Output Window, Task List and the Error List in Visual Studio 2005. If there are several of these toolwindows open, VS will navigate between the results of the last active tool window. To step backward through the list, use Shift+F8.

If you are using a different keyboard scheme, go to Tools Options Environment Keyboard and look for the keybindings for Edit.GoToNextLocation and Edit.GoToPreviousLocation

Happy Editing!

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 Screen Mode stays in Full Screen Mode. Besides being a bad pun on the Las Vegas ads, whatever modifications you make in Full Screen Mode will not affect the design mode or any other mode.

There are four window layout modes in Visual Studio: Design, Debugging / Running, Full Screen, and single file. The single file is when you run devenv <filename> from the command line. Making a customization in on of these will persist only in that mode and not affect any other.

Happy Editing!

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 tips about keyboard shortcuts, so I’ll keep the keyboard shortcut tips coming.

Happy Editing!

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+Shift+G
• Set a breakpoint on a function – type the name of the function and press F9
• Get help – type the keyword and press F1

And using command aliases…

• To get a callstack – type “> kb”
• To go to a webpage – type “> nav http://www.microsoft.com”

See http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/vsintro7/html/vxgrfpredefinedcommandlinealiases.asp for the complete list.

What other command aliases should go in this list that people like to use?

Happy Editing!

both Visual Studio .NET 2003 and Visual Studio 2005, you can enable either Word Wrap or Virtual Space.

To use…

1. Open Tools – Options
2. Open the Text Editor – All Languages – General page (or the specific language page of your choice)
3. Check either Word Wrap or Virtual Space

In Visual Studio 2005, you’ll have the option to Show visual glyphs for word wrap.

To split the current window, just go to Window – Split from the main menu (or use the splitter control between the file tab channel and the scroll bar for the doc).

To create new windows for the same document, just go to Window – New Window and create as many views on the same document as you would like.  (not supported for VB, unfortunately)

These features are available for both VS .NET 2003 and VS 2005.

In both Visual Studio .NET 2003 and Visual Studio 2005, there’s an Open With associated with the Open File Dialog. I probably had used this dialog a thousands times and never once noticed the Open button was actually one of those button / combo box hybrids.

To use

1. Go to File – Open File
2. Click the drop down button on the Open button (or from keyboard, just press down arrow)
3. Choose “Binary Editor” and press OK or Open (depending on your VS version)

Happy (binary) Editing!

Another simple little feature, but very powerful, especially when you deal with white space as much as I do. The first time I saw a developer using it, it thought, “Yuck”, but now I’m addicted, even when I’m not testing white space in a file.

To enable in both Visual Studio .NET 2003 and Visual Studio 2005, go to

Edit – Advanced – View White Space

Note: this option is only available when there’s a file open, but the option state will persist across files and VS sessions.

As a follow up to yesterday’s post, the point of the Ctrl+D window is to do a quick find in the current document. If you want to customize your quick find experience, just do Ctrl+F (Edit – Find and Replace – Quick Find) and any changes made in the Quick Find tool window will apply to the Ctrl+D window.

What makes this a Tip of the Day post? Well, not only can you search forward (type in the search string and press enter), but also you can search backward (type in the search string and press Shift+Enter).

Happy Editing!