Visual Studio – Tip #1

 

Like a lot of people, I find F1 in Visual Studio practically useless. I did read a suggestion to remap F1 to Debug->Run just so it did something useful.

Not wanting to waste a precious key I’ve decided to remap F1 to run the currently selected unit test in Resharper’s Unit Test Sessions window via the ReSharper_UnitTestSession_RunProcess command. Only problem is that windows needs to be selected before RunProcess will work. Visual Studio Macros to the rescue:

   1:      Sub Run_Current_Session()

   2:          DTE.Windows.Item("{B2BC9916-E3E6-43A8-AD5F-3BDB95F53DB5}").Activate()

   3:          DTE.ExecuteCommand("ReSharper_UnitTestSession_RunProcess")

   4:      End Sub

Moving on I’ve applied the same tactic to map F6 to ReSharper_UnitTestSession_DebugProcess. The productivity increase has been quite noticeable.

More random tips soon…

Asp.Net Web Development Server Tip

Well call me slow but I just realized that the built in Asp.Net Web Development Server allows you to recompile/deploy your assemblies without the need to restart the web server. This seems to have been available since at least VS 2005 so all this time I've been debugging through pages for apparently no reason... I seem to remember that closing IE would kill the web server while debugging, which definitely isn't the case (anymore?).

What's even more interesting is that Session data is preserved across deployments. Was hoping authentication would be as well but I haven't had time to test that properly.

I'm mostly using Asp.Net MVC these days which tends to mitigate the need to do the old login->browse->debug routine. Still handy to remember though

Visual Studio Tip - Hiding Toolbars

I had a funny realization a couple of days ago that I don't actually use any of the default toolbars in Visual Studio. For someone who normally developments on a 24" 1920*1200 monitor it hasn't really been an issue in the past. However I'm currently doing all my development on a 1024*768 laptop, (yeah i know, lame huh?) so I really need all the space I can get.

Funny thing is I don't think I've one needed to reinstated a toolbar yet. Keyboard shortcuts seem to be sufficient for just about everything, ReSharper obviously helps though :)

I'm even tempted to generate the list of Keyboard Shortcuts I currently have enabled.