@Henning

If the vanilla look of Visual Studio doesn’t do it for you, check out studiostyles.net. Here you’ll find a huge amount of visual styles for Visual Studio 2008 and 2010.

BTW: my current favorite theme is Desert Nights Reloaded – even though I doesn’t make use of my beloved Envy Code R font …

Sara Ford started in 2007 to publish daily tips and tricks on working with Visual Studio 2008 on her blog. Now Zain Naboulsi took over and is also presenting tips on working with Visual Studio 2010.

So after figuring, that the WSPBuilder is actually representing the good I fully embraced it.

To take it to the next level, I installed the Visual-Studio extensions (not only to increase the number of plugins, but this is a nice side-effect; [pluginCount++]). Unfortunately this wasn’t very cooperative to work with my german version of Visual Studio.

So after some frustration I came across an according issue and tried the proposed alternative WSPTools.VisualStudio.VSAddIn.dll – and what should I say – it actually works!

So now I’m actually waiting for this to be merged into the release of the WSPBuilder.

(happy WSPBuilding …)

If you’re a keyboard-shortcut-junkie just like me, you want to have all your currently assign keybindings memorized … but there’s a way to supply you some kind of cheat.

With this little macro you can list all currently active keybinding of visual studio:

Imports System
Imports EnvDTE
Imports EnvDTE80
Imports EnvDTE90
Imports System.Diagnostics
Public Module KeyboardShortcuts
Function GetOutputWindowPane(ByVal Name As String, Optional ByVal show As Boolean = True) As OutputWindowPane
Dim window As Window
Dim outputWindow As OutputWindow
Dim outputWindowPane As OutputWindowPane
window = DTE.Windows.Item(EnvDTE.Constants.vsWindowKindOutput)
If show Then window.Visible = True
outputWindow = window.Object
Try
outputWindowPane = outputWindow.OutputWindowPanes.Item(Name)
Catch e As System.Exception
outputWindowPane = outputWindow.OutputWindowPanes.Add(Name)
End Try
outputWindowPane.Activate()
Return outputWindowPane
End Function
Sub ListCommands()
Dim outwin As OutputWindowPane = GetOutputWindowPane("List Commands", True)
outwin.Clear()
For Each cmd As Command In DTE.Commands
Dim bindings() As Object
bindings = cmd.Bindings
For Each binding As String In bindings
outwin.OutputString(cmd.Name.ToString() + vbTab + binding + vbCrLf)
Next
Next
End Sub
End Module

Recently WSPBuilder caught my attention, and I started to play a little with the command-line tool. WSPBuilder dramatically eases the creation of WSP-Files to deploy SharePoint solutions.

But even more interesting would be an integration into Visual Studio – and since I’m not the first one to recognize this need there is already an addin.

Unfortunately the menu-extension is not visible on my german installation of Windows (and Visual Studio). So there is some manual work needed:

• copy the WSPTools.VisualStudio.VSAddIn.AddIn from C:\Dokumente und Einstellungen\All Users\Anwendungsdaten\Microsoft\MSEnvShared\Addins to C:\Dokumente und Einstellungen\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\MSEnvShared\Addins.
• startup Visual Studio and make sure the addin is being started by checking the appropriate check-box.

OK, you probably know it by now … there is a whole lot of stuff writte in nice angle-brackets, but there is way to little intellisense support for all this.

Just like others (NHibernate, WCF) the solution is quite simple: just copy the appropriate xsd file to C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Xml\Schemas\1033. In this case the MSBuild.Community.Tasks.xsd can be found in C:\Program Files\MSBuild\MSBuildCommunityTasks.

If you thought that ReSharper (R#) is putting your Visual Studio on stereoids then what do you thing about extending R# capabilities using R#-plugins?

I just added a bundle of them …

• Agent Johnson
• Scout Plugin
• Agent Smith
• StyleCop for ReSharper
• and last but not least Gallio

Seems like every piece of XML-code I recently write (mainly for WiX and MOSS these days) needs just about a dozen of GUIDs all over the place – well maybe just a bundle :=) … anyway!

OK, so guidgen.exe is a lot of help, but it’s also kind of a PITA to leave the keyboard, grab the mouse, do the clicking … in this time you could think of a new GUID yourself! So there must be a better way – and there is!

Just create a simple macro returning a new GUID – and you’re all set.

1. start a new macro-project, maybe rename the default-module to something more appropriate
2. use DTE.ActiveDocument.Selection.Text = System.Guid.NewGuid().ToString("D").ToUpper() to grab a new GUID
3. assign the newly created macro a keyboard shortcut (tools\options\environment\keyboard) – ALG+G seems to be pretty intuitive
4. ready to roll the GUIDs

I just found a great post about tips & trick on how to work more efficient with Visual Studio 2008 – go check it out on Steven Walter’s Blogpost.