Under Tools – Options – Projects And Solutions – Build And Run, there’s the Maximum Number Of Parallel Project Builds edit box.

Try as you might, this will never work on non-VC projects. Makes me wonder why the label doesn’t just say Visual C++ projects. Probably a historical reason for it.

These are some MSBuild blog entries I found on building projects in parallel using MSBuild. if you know of more recent, or more descriptive content, please leave the URL as a comment.

Visual Studio 2008 – http://blogs.msdn.com/msbuild/archive/2007/04/26/building-projects-in-parallel.aspx

.NET FX 3.5 – http://blogs.msdn.com/msbuild/archive/2007/10/22/enabling-multiprocessor-support-in-an-msbuild-host.aspx

Technorati Tags: VS2005Tip,VS2008Tip

Reshmi, a SDET on the Web Development Tools team, is running a new Tips and Tricks blog for ASP.NET, IIS, and Visual Web Developer tips. This is great to see, since I constantly get Visual Web Developer questions that I can’t answer.

http://blogs.msdn.com/webdevelopertips

Reshmi is on tip #10, which shows you just how far behind I am on blogging. =)

Ahh, finally, back to one of the IDE feature areas I used to test – Projects and Solutions! And no other better way to start than a Tools Options series…

You can figure at a global level, across all languages (VB, VC, and C# are the ones i’ve tested) in your solution, how, when, and whether Visual Studio saves your files before a build.

Go to the Tools – Options – Projects And Solutions – Build And Run page, and under Before Building: you’ll have the following options:

Save All Changes – pretty obvious. VS will save all unsaved edits whether you hit F5, build the solution, or build a specific project.

Save Changes To Open Documents Only – again, pretty obvious. VS will save all unsaved edits to files that are currently-opened in the IDE, whether you hit F5, build the solution, or build a specific project.

Prompt To Save Changes – You’ll see the standard prompt appear whenever you have unsaved files in the editor.

Don’t Save Any Changes – just as you would expect, keeps unsaved files unsaved. However, VS will build based on the code that appears currently in the editor, and not against the last-saved code that’s one file.

Technorati Tags: VS2005Tip,VS2008Tip

Sara Aside: Matt and I were IM’ing each other this morning, and he congratulated me for the book being sent to printing yesterday. He asked me if I planned to sleep with it like a stuff animal. I said of course I was going to..

One of the hardest things about working at Microsoft is to see the cool applications people develop never get released. Of course, it’s a night and day difference now compared to several years ago. But still, it is frustrating to hear customers ask for functionality, a feature, or a tool, and you know the answer is sitting in a source control repository somewhere behind the corpnet firewall. Hey, I’m speaking to you whoever you were at ReMix who asked me about editing a snippet file.

http://www.codeplex.com/SnippetDesigner

Matt’s a very sharp, talented developer. Go try it out, send him feedback, (rate it! – my shameless plug for my feature), and show some love. I know he’ll appreciate the feedback and will do whatever to make this tool a successful open source project.

Snippet Editor - hosted in the IDE which lets you edit the code, make replacements and change snippet properties:

And a Snippet Explorer - which lets you search for Snippet files on your computer an quickly open and edit them. The built-in Code Snippet Manager only organizes your snippets on disk and shows you their metadata as read-only. The overall Snippet Designer tool goes one step further and actually allows you to edit your snippets, create them on the fly, and so forth.

You can read more on Matt’s blog at

http://blogs.msdn.com/matt/archive/2008/09/21/the-snippet-designer-is-released.aspx

Sara Aside: No, I really do not plan to sleep with the book. I’ll just end up drooling it or kicking it.

And last but not least, there was the HTML Visualizer…

And your HTML appears as it would in a browser.

Technorati Tags: VS2005Tip,VS2008Tip

Let’s say you have a more interesting string that contains xml, say one of the code snippet files.

You can still use the Text Visualizer to view the xml, but that’s not very exciting.

If you select the XML Visualizer, then you get the xml syntax highlighting.

Much more exciting!

Technorati Tags: VS2005Tip,VS2008Tip

At the bottom of the Text Visualizer dialog box, there’s the option to toggle word wrap, to give you the true notepad experience.

when unchecked, you get the data going straight across the dialog box

Technorati Tags: VS2005Tip,VS2008Tip

Let’s say you have a long string, maybe a SQL connection string or just some tabular data (or data separated by a space as shown below), and you need to view the entire string.

Of course, you could cut and paste into notepad to view the contents, but there’s a way to achieve the same effect from within Visual Studio.

Bring up the DataTip for the string, and click the circled drop down arrow:

Now you’ll see a list of Visualizers to choose from.

Since this is a string, today’s tip picks the Text Visualizer. Note that this dialog box is resizable and you can copy and paste from within.

Technorati Tags: VS2005Tip,VS2008Tip

If you just quickly want to know what exception has been caught, without having to figure out the variable name of the exception in the try catch, you can just type in $exception in the watch window.

Technorati Tags: VS2005Tip,VS2008Tip