‘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.

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.

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.

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.