Monthly Archives: January 2006

The top 10 most visited tips

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Today’s post marks the 100th Tip on the Tip of the Week!  To celebrate the occasion, let’s recap our top 10 most visited* tips.

#10 – How to bind Keyboard Shortcuts to commands

#9 – How to do column selection

#8 – What C# books to read

#7 – How to optimize Visual Studio for Multi-Monitor setups

#6 – How to save your favorite window layouts in VS .NET 2003

#5 – Type-ahead selection works in Solution Explorer

#4 – Use Ctrl+Alt+DownArrow to quickly access all your open files

#3 – Use Ctrl-K Ctrl-C to comment selection and Ctrl-K Ctrl-U to uncomment selection

#2 – How to use Full Screen Mode

And the most visited Tip on Tip of the Week…

#1 – How to have fun with the Find Combo box

Prior to starting the Tip of the Week, I wrote this entry that would have blown all of these out of the water.

Guidelines – a hidden feature for the Visual Studio Editor

*most visited = number of web hits (how many people visited the website through a web browser) + RSS hits (how many people read the entry via a RSS reader)

Job openings on our Developer Solutions Team

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Are you passionate about your community and your customers?  Do you want to take Visual Studio to the next level in Community?  Do you love PowerToys?

We have two PM positions open on our team that do just this.  From Josh’s blog:

I’ve got two PM openings on a small “tiger” team that’s positioned to drive huge changes into all of Developer Division and potentially Microsoft as a whole.

What’s the Developer Solutions team all about?

The Developer Solutions team is all about making developer customers more successful and satisfied with released products. This means delivering great 1st party developer “Powertoys” that solve specific customer pain points with our developer products. It also means making sure there are healthy Microsoft support communities to answer broad questions. Finally it means that there are healthy 3rd party communities dedicated to sample, white-paper, libraries, and tool development.

What sort of “powertoys” are you delivering?

To give you an idea… we’re a small agile team and we have three tools already in development. These include the MSBee tool that allows for .NET 1.1 compilation from MS Build, a TFS Administration tool that will allow you to more easily manage permissions on your Team Foundation Servers, and a “managed stack explorer” to examine running processes and get more detailed debugging information. What we do down the road could be up to you.

How do we keep our support communities healthy?

The web forums have launched as a support platform and we have an opportunity to drive changes in their design and our behind the scenes support process to improve the answer rates in our communities. Today, for example, Microsoft focuses a lot of support energy in 1 to 1 support interactions, but we can begin to shift some percentage of our support cases into 1 to many venues like KB articles, wiki’s, and the support forums. It’s a chance to lower the support costs for us, as a company, and the customers who have issues. It’s your chance to start a shift that could propagate into every product we ship!

If interested, definitely contact Josh, but feel free to ask me any questions.

Here are the links to the positions again:

Position #1

Position #2

Disable Add-ins on Start-Up by holding the Left-Shift key down

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If you ever want to disable add-ins from starting on launch, you can hold down the Left-Shift key while VS is loading.  If you find yourself running into random crashes, you might want to try disabling add-ins (either by this Left-Shift method or going to the Tools – Add-in Manager) to determine if it is a VS issue or an Add-in issue.  You’ll still be able to manually restart your Add-in during this VS session.

If you are seeing random VS crashes and you have Add-ins installed, the Visual Studio Team on the MSDN Forums would love to know if disabling add-ins had any effect on the crashes.

For any questions related to Add-ins, please check out the Extensibility Forums!

Got an Add-in Tip?  Submit it here!

Happy Visual Studio’ing!

The beginning of the end for Waveland, MS

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There’s been a lot of discussions about merging the two cities.  Funny, I always thought Waveland would make it because it had the Walmart (which has been opened when nothing else was).  The ball has been in Waveland’s court, until now.

Coincidentally, Ryan, the writer for the below article, was in my grade / class in elementary school.  Small towns. =)

FROM SUN HERALD Newspaper
Posted on Wed, Jan. 18, 2006

Waveland asks for meeting

By RYAN LAFONTAINE
rlafontaine@sunherald.com

WAVELAND - An historic meeting could be in the offing in Hancock County.

Waveland leaders want to meet with officials from neighboring Bay St. Louis sometime this month to discuss merging resources. It’s up to Bay St. Louis to RSVP.

Alderman voted tonight to meet with the Bay City Council on either Jan. 24 or 25 to discuss combing services, creating inter-local agreements and coordinating comprehensive plans for the two cities.

VS Macro to Build a Web.SiteMap file from your project system file layout

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Today’s tip comes from Scott Allen’s blog.  Scott has provided a VS 2005 macro that will dynamically build a web.sitemap file based on the files in your project.

For any questions related to ASP.NET, please check out the ASP.NET forums!

Got an ASP.NET Tip?  Submit it here!

Happy Visual Studio’ing!

Embracing my Program Management side

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After 4.5 years on the VS Environment / VS Core team, I’ve finally decided to make the switch into Program Management.  Don’t get me wrong, I love testing.  It’s still the ultimate “you broke it and I’m telling.”  But, I can’t resist the temptation of the driver’s seat anymore.

I recall being told that the secret of life is to figure out what you love to do, then get someone to pay you to do it.  And at work, I love nothing more than blogging and interacting with customers.  Therefore, I’m very excited to join the DevDiv Community Team!  Specifically, I’m working on the Developer After-Market Community Solutions Team.

Since today was just my first day, I’m going to hold off on specific responsibilities.  I probably should get my goals / commitments written first.  =)  However, I can tell you that my new role will involve working more closely with you.  And yes, Tip of the Week continues, hopefully with more gravitas than ever before!  (Thanks Stephen Colbert for adding this word to my vocabulary.)

I want to give a shout-out to all those I’ve worked with on the VS Environment / VS Core team.  As I said in my “so long and thanks for all the fish” mail, it’s been an incredible experience to have worked with you all on the Visual Studio environment / shell.  I’m very proud to have worked on thteam for 3 releases of Visual Studio.

For more info, check out my team’s blog and Josh’s intro post to the Developer After-Market Community Solutions Team.

I look forward to hearing from you all about how I can make you more successful with Visual Studio 2005.  Wish me luck in my new role!

Awesome Before / After shots of Waveland, MS and the Mississippi Gulf Coast by The Sun Herald

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The Sun Herald has these really cool flash animations showing before and after Katrina photos.  I’ve been asked to provide some pre-Katrina photos, but alas, one never thinks to take a picture of the things you’ve seen every single day for 20 years.

http://www.sunherald.com/mld/sunherald/news/special_packages/renewal/before_after/

Waveland (my hometown) is under Hancock County.  Only the Before / After photo of St. Clare Church is from Waveland, but Bay St. Louis, Pass Christian, and Long Beach were hit just as hard.  If you check out the trailer on the right, that’s where your donated items went to (minus the clothes that had to go to a place in Diamondhead.)

Here’s a breakdown of the Mississippi Gulf Coast by Counties and Cities:

(New Orleans, LA) – Hancock County – Harrison County – Jackson County

(New Orleans, LA) – Waveland – Bay St. Louis – Pass Christian – Long Beach – Gulfport – Biloxi – (Mobile, AL)

I also wanted to call out this before / after shot of the Bay Bridge (that connects Bay St. Louis to Pass Christian).

I think the Beachwalk Condominiums in Long Beach really captures the scene.  You drive by these buildings all the time, and then suddenly they are gone, along with every other building in a 50 mile stretch of road.

Let me know if you have before / after photos of Waveland and Bay St. Louis that you would like me to share.