Getting the Most Out of Visual Studio .NET
By Scott Mitchell
Introduction If your job entails creating Web applications with
ASP.NET, you likely use Visual Studio .NET (VS.NET) as your development
environment. While Visual Studio .NET is a very powerful development
environment, I've found many of its quirks to be annoying. For example, I loathe
creating my ASP.NET Web pages in the GridLayout. Previously, everytime I created
a new ASP.NET Web page the very first thing I'd do was right-click in the
Designer and change the Page Layout option from GridLayout to FlowLayout.
Recently, though, I discovered how this feature can be disabled permanently!
In this article we'll discuss how to tweak Visual Studio .NET so that it's
most productive for you. Visual Studio .NET is too large a beast for one man to
know all of its intricate secrets, so if I am missing any options you find
indespensable, or am lacking the hacks you have thrown together to make Visual
Studio .NET work for you, please let me know, and I'll be
sure to add your suggestions to this article!
One final word: the customizations I mention were tested with Visual Studio
.NET 2003. If these customizations need further tweaking to work with VS.NET
2002, please be sure to let me know. Thanks!
Setting the Default Page Layout As mentioned in the Introduction, one of my biggest peevs with Visual Studio
.NET is that, by default, it has new ASP.NET Web pages created with the
GridLayout. I prefer working in FlowLayout, and find it annoying that each time
I create a new ASP.NET Web page I have to manually change the page layout from
GridLayout to FlowLayout.
Thankfully, you can customize if ASP.NET Web pages should use GridLayout or
FlowLayout by default for a given ASP.NET Web application project. Once you have
opened an ASP.NET Web application Project, right-click on the Project name in
the Solution Explorer and go to Properties. From the Properties dialog box,
select the Designer Defaults option from the left. This will display, among
other drop-down lists, a Page Layout drop-down list (see the screenshot on the
right). You can specify here that the default page layout should be FlowLayout
for the ASP.NET Web pages in this project.
Viewing ASP.NET Web Pages in the HTML View By Default By default, whenever you create or load an ASP.NET Web page, it shows the
page in the Design view. This is great if the first things you typically do is
drag on Web controls from the Toolbox, but, if you're like me, you usually start
working on a page by hand-entering HTML markup. If you fall into this camp, then
you'll likely save a couple seconds by having ASP.NET Web pages open in HTML
view by default.
To set the HTML view as the default view, go to the Tools menu and choose
Options. From the list of Options on the left, choose the HTML Designer option.
Then, on the right, you can choose to start Web Form pages in HTML View, as
shown in the screenshot to the left.
Add Line Numbers to Your Code-Behind Classes Did you know that you
can add line numbers to your code files in VS.NET? Line numbers are especially
helpful if discussing a block of code with someone else, as you can refer to a
specific line numbers. To turn on line numbers, go to the Tools menu, choose
Options, and from the left-hand side select the Text Editor / C# or the Text
Editor / Basic options. In the right-hand side you'll find a "Line numbers"
checkbox. Check this and line numbers will be added to your code files, as shown
below.
Creating Custom Web Form Wizards When working with an ASP.NET Web
application you can add new files to the project by right-clicking on the
project name in the Solution Explorer, choosing Add, and clicking on Add New
Item. This pops up a dialog box from which you can choose a file type to add,
such as a Web Form, an XML file, a Web User Control, a Web Service, and so on.
Did you know that you can create your own "types" here by just creating and
editing a few files? Perhaps your company's Web Forms have some standard User
Controls for header and footer HTML markup. You could create your own Web Form
Wizard so that when you added a new file of the custom type, it would
automatically have the standard HTML and/or code-behind class markup specific to
your company!
Know Your Keyboard Shortcuts Visual Studio .NET can virtually be
used without a mouse at all. There are keyboard shortcuts galore. For example,
Ctrl+G will popup the "Go To Line Number" box, an invaluable tool when needing
to quickly jump to a line where an error has occurred. Ctrl+Shift+A displays the
Add a New Item dialog box. F5 compiles and starts the application. Ctrl+L cuts
the line the cursor's at. For a reasonably good list, you can view part of the
Appendix
C from Mastering
Visual Studio .NET (found via Ray Osherove's blog).
Store Commonly Used Code Snippets in the Toolbox This tip comes in
from Korby Parnell:
One of my favorite VS.NET productivity tricks is to store code
snippets as toolbox items. Arguably, this trick is better for comments than code
since you can't reference them. To add text to the Toolbox, highlight it in the
code editor, drag it over to your toolbox, and drop it when the tooltip changes
from the no smoking sign into rectangle. Thereafter, you can simply drag and
drop the snippet to your editor for reuse.
Select Code Using Column Mode This tip comes in from Arsen Yeremin:
Use ALT button while selecting to select in "COLUMN MODE".
Customize the Start Page When Visual Studio .NET loads up, by
default the Start Page is shown, which lists the most recent projects. 4Guys
reader Jon Vandermeulen writes in on how to tweak VS.NET so that more than just
the default four projects are shown on the Start Page:
By default, your start page only shows the last 4 projects you
worked on. But if you're like us, then you would routinely work on quite a few
more than that. The setting is located in Tools > Options > Environment
> General > Display ___ items in most recently used list.
Using TODO, HACK, and UNDONE Comments This tip comes in from
Stephen Vakil:
I have another tip for VS. Not many people I've met know about TODO
comments. When you begin a comment with ToDo or TODO or however you want to
capitalize it, you can then see this comment in your task list by changing the
task list options. This is very useful for marking parts of your code that you
later need to work on.
By default, there is also a HACK and UNDONE comment that I use from time to
time. You can add comments that can be seen on the task list by going to
Tools->Options, then under the environment folder select Task List.
Macros Most developers I've met and talked to throughout my career
have shared one thing in common: their interest in solving problems and their
disdain of the mundane. Boring, repetitive tasks are the bane of the development
world, so much so that oftentimes programmers will spend countless hours
constructing a solution that relieves them from some mundane chore, even if the
time it takes to build a workaround is longer than the time that the boring task
would require!
A common "bore chore" in development is hammering out similar code, a task
good IDEs will eliminate - and Visual Studio .NET is no exception. Visual Studio
.NET allows for both simple, recorded macros, as well as
programmatically-created macros. To work with macros explore the Macro submenu,
which is found under the Tools menu in Visual Studio .NET (seen the screenshot
to the right). You can record a macro through the GUI via the Record Temporary
Macro. To create a macro programmatically, choose the Macros IDE. The Macro
Explorer lists all of the Visual Studio .NET macros that can be run.
For more information on creating and using Macros in Visual Studio .NET, be
sure to read Improving Developer Productivity
with Visual Studio .NET Macros, which looks at how to use Macros to
automatically create public properties that use the ViewState
collection as their backing store (a task common among ASP.NET server control
developers).
For More Visual Studio .NET Tips and Tricks...
For more tips and tricks for Visual Studio .NET be
sure to check out James Avery's book Visual
Studio Hacks. The book provides 100 hacks for turbocharging the IDE.
(...Shameless self promotion alert...) I
wrote five hacks for James' book: Halting on exceptions; Using the Reflector
Add-In; Setting breakpoints; Spell checking your code/comments; and Generating
metrics on your code (i.e., LOCs, code complexity, etc.). See this blog entry for
more information.
Conclusion The above list is only a smattering of tips for
extending Visual Studio .NET. If you have any tips in your bag of Visual Studio
.NET tricks, I'd be interested in hearing about them!
Hopefully, over time, this article can become a great source for getting the
most out of Visual Studio .NET.
