Cause nothing lasts forever… even cold November rain

My most sincere thanks to you for reading the 17 month series. Because of you, people from my hometown are going to college. All because of community inspiring community.

I want to part ways saying community is about people, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. It is not the “if you build it they will come” infrastructure theory (that’s just a movie). Community is about the connections we establish and foster. Or better stated by someone whose name I cannot recall, Community is about being excellent to each other.

I *really* wish I could continue, but I haven’t worked on VS in 3 years now. And 80% of the series was written in my personal time. I would tell people I refuse to calculate just how much time I’ve spent writing tips. But now that it’s over, the answer is 12,500 minutes or 208 hours. And no, this doesn’t count the hours writing the book, which I refuse to ever do.

My next quest is to do something with the CodePlex community (my actual day job) like I did here with Visual Studio or Accessibility or the Legal Evangelism Thinkweek paper. yes, i know, i know, “legal what??”

I’ve been waiting a very long time to run some experiments in connecting with the CodePlex community, and finally I can start to play in this space. If you have any ideas for engaging the CodePlex / Open Source community that you think I should try, you know where to find me. Never underestimate the power of community inspiring community.

And now, here’s your final Tip of the Day for Visual Studio 2008, already in progress…

msinfo32.exe

I can never remember the executable name (msinfo32) to start the System Information application.

Fortunately, I can always rely on the Visual Studio Help About dialog to launch the app for me. Go to Help-About, and on the bottom right corner of the page, you’ll see the System Information button.

Clicking System Info will do the same as running msinfo32.exe from the command prompt.

Happy Visual Studio’ing!!!

But don’t unsubscribe yet! Starting in 2009, I plan to create a separate feed somewhere (just not on this blog) to restart the series all over again, but 7 days a week. Stay tuned.

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This is really a repost from 3 (and even 4) years ago when Tip of the Day was just a weekly series. I’m really glad to hear that Visual Studio 2010 will have multi-monitor support. Really, really glad, as you can tell from the original blog post. Of course, there’s a story behind this which should be told at another time…

Here are some ideas for optimizing Visual Studio (non-2010 versions). Ironically, I don’t use multi-monitors anymore (neck strain) so hopefully I haven’t forgotten to find someone’s machine to take some screenshots.

1. Stretching the VS across dual monitors

   Put Visual Studio into a restore state, where you can resize it. Then stretch VS across both monitors.

   One of the benefits of doing this is to be able to view code in each monitor.  You can do a vertical split (Window – New Vertical Tab Group) down the center of the dual monitors.  Now you can have code windows on each monitor.

   You can also customize the toolbars to place them on which ever monitor you prefer as your primary.  Just grab the grip control for the toolbars and drag them over to whichever monitor.

2. Viewing Debugging Tool Windows on secondary monitor

   Whenever I’m debugging, I prefer to have tool windows like the Watch Window and Output Window on the secondary monitor, with VS occupying the primary monitor.  These tool windows have to be either dockable or floating (floating is what you probably want).  Resize these windows to occupy half of the screen.  Remember, you can use Tools – Import / Export Settings to save your favorite window layouts.  And since these windows only appear during debugging, you don’t have to worry about them occupying your secondary monitor when not in use.

3. Place External Help on secondary monitor

   Put DExplore (Documentation Explorer) on the second monitor, but most of you probably already do this instinctively.

For more ideas, or to read the original blog post, go to http://blogs.msdn.com/saraford/archive/2005/07/20/441126.aspx

A while back, when I was collecting Visual Studio tips, the “Open Source” command was pointed out to me. Considering my day job (I’m the Program Manager for CodePlex.com), I couldn’t wrap my head around this command, even after the 2 second demo. After a few minutes, it clicked that it was “open” as in “view,” and not as in “Open.”

In honor of my day job, I decided to showcase this command as a tip. (My blog title made you look, didn’t it?)

In DExplorer (Documentation Explorer), whenever you do a search, you’ll get results by different search providers.

The above example shows a CodeGuru article result. Selecting open will take you directly to the article, but selecting open source will take you directly to CodeGuru.com. In other words, it will open the source of the article.

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This tip is specific for Visual Studio 2008.

You can easily find the samples that have been installed for Visual Studio by going to Help-Samples. Then in the browser, click on the local Samples folder link.

As the message box states, the samples are in a .zip file, so you’ll need to extract these files before you attempt to build. Otherwise, the build will fail, and you’ll wonder why the samples that came with the product don’t work.

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I feel obligated to talk about Dynamic Help. In any feature area that I tested, there was always the Help category in the test case bed. The Help category represented things like F1, documentation content, and of course Dynamic Help.

Dynamic Help is a tool window that will always give you a list of related help documents based on your current context.

For example, suppose you’re in an empty C# class with the focus on the keyword class. In dynamic help, you’ll see a list of Help topics including “class (C# Reference)” and “C# Keywords”

And jumping to a WinForm Designer on a button causes the context to change

The Dynamic Help tool window is found at Help – Dynamic Help. I think most of the default settings do not show the Dynamic Help window by default.

Also note that if you are using a Screen Reader (or a similar Assistive Technology Device), you should definitely turn off Dynamic Help by closing the window and permanently saving that window layout. The issue is a Screen Reader is always looking for things that are changing on the screen, especially in the active application, at least back in my day. When I first started learning how to use screen readers, I would hear these random words out of nowhere. It took me a while to realize it was coming from the Dynamic Help window changing context and updating its UI. In addition, you’ll experience some performance improvements when the screen reader isn’t trying to figure out what to read and what to ignore.

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If you do a search for the phrase “how to create a custom winform control” using the default options in the General Development Environment, you’ll get back 500 results, as shown below.

If you go to Tools – Options – Help – General (and in VS shell, add Environment in the node path), you’ll see the option include partial matches in local search results.

If you uncheck this option and repeat the search, you’ll have only 9 hits in local help to scan through instead of 500.

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Today’s tip is just a collection of some tweaks you can make to your search results. Although 16 months ago, I would have said each one of these tweaks is its own tip. But these days I’m all about quality over quantity , since you readers keep me honest when I start to slack. =D

Tip 376.A You can make the abstracts appear as Tooltips

If the abstracts become way to distracting or you want to see more results per page,

you can Right-click on any search result and uncheck Show Abstract. Now the abstracts only appear in the tooltip.

Tip 376.B You can remove the highlight search hits by refreshing the site

If you have a lot of terms in your search query, like in the example below “how to define a class in C#” it can be a little hard to read.

I couldn’t find any highlight command that could toggle the highlight state, so the best I can offer is hitting the refresh button. It removes the highlight for both local and online search.

If hitting refresh gets old, you can go to Tools – Options – Help – General (in DExplorer, if in VS add the Environment node), and uncheck Highlight Search Terms.

Tip 376.C You can sort results that contain source code

In the results list, there’s the sort by combo box that has "Contains Code" as an option.

If you are looking for some sample code, this would be to have as the filter, because it will move all these search results to the top.

Tip 376.D How to change the Web Browser Search page

I only add this because I saw this option in Tools Options, and couldn’t for the life of me figure out where the actual button or command lived. I did a few searches for “search page option” but only found the option, and nothing about the command. Only while writing this post did I accidentally or coincidentally hit it, hence why it is going here.

The option to change the page that clicking this button goes is at Tools – Options – Web Browser. (or in VS, add the Environment).

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According to my notes (taken on July 11, 2007, so it’s been a while), you should be able to save your search filters too, so I’m wondering if this is a “just me” situation or if this is working for others. Yes, I’ll admit, I haven’t installed SP1 yet (yes, I’m a bad VS blogger, no cookie for me.) so maybe this was fix in SP1?

On the standard DExplorer (Document Explorer) toolbar, there’s the Save Search button.

This will save your current search query to the Help Favorites window under Help Searches. You can give your search strings meaningful names (more meaningful than my example) and customize the list order, as shown below.

Note that the “search 1” saved query is for an empty search. The idea here (according to  my notes) is that your custom filters are still saved, so you can quickly type in a new search term without having to recreate your custom filters. So, I hope I’m doing something wrong, because this would be cool…

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If you bring up a help page by pressing F1, doing a search, filtering via the Index, or any other method that doesn’t involve the Contents tool window, you’ll notice the Contents window will be out of sync with the current page.

To put it back in sync with the Contents window, you can click the “Sync with Table of Contents” button on the DExplorer (document explorer) toolbar, as shown below.

However, you may notice that this button isn’t available from time to time. That is because this feature only works when  you are using local help instead of Online help. In the General Development Settings, the default is to try Online help first, and then local help. Within DExplorer, this setting can be found in Tools – Options – Help – Online. (or in Visual Studio, it’s under the Environment node.)

If you really need to sync with the Table of Contents window, then switch to local help (and shown below).

Then, you’ll need to redo the action that brought up the page in order to switch to local help. Please correct me if i’m wrong, but I don’t think there’s a “switch to local/online” button to refresh the page (but i could be wrong.)

If you are using online help, the URL will start off with “http” and if using local help, it will start off with “ms-help.”

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