Zain Naboulsi, a Developer Evangelist, has started the Tip of the Day series for Visual Studio 2010. I spent a lot of time with Zain last year sharing what I’ve learned about writing a new tip every single day for a year, so he knows what he’s getting into. =D I’m very excited to see the series return!

It’s all yours Zain!

http://blogs.msdn.com/zainnab/archive/tags/vs2010/Tips+and+Tricks/default.aspx

Going through my folder of my blog “contact me” emails, I came across this question. I like tricking Visual Studio into doing things, so I thought I’d share.

Is there a way to display only line number of coded lines, i.e. don’t number blank lines? Numbered blank lines makes showing code in powerpoint decks hard to follow.

Here’s the screenshot of what could go into your powerpoint deck.

To do this,

1. Enable Word Wrap (Tools Options - Text Editor - All Languages - General)
2. At the end of the first real line (like #28 above), start inserting white space until it goes off the screen. Note the Word Wrap glyph.
3. Turn off the Word Wrap glyph (same place as in step 1) and Turn off “View White Space” (Edit - Advance – View White Space)

Here’s what the hack really looks like

Sorry, this isn’t the start of a new VS tip series. Just wanted to share some q&a that have come in through my blog.

Petition is here: http://twtpoll.com/iuz95p and closes Aug 5.

When I was 3 years old, I invented the “Koala bear game.” You hide the Koala bear behind your back, then run up to the adults asking them “guess what i’ve got behind my back?” I played night after night after night, until I discovered this thing called “memory.” The next time when the adults answered “your Koala bear”, I said “nope, i got a flashlight.” It was absolutely the funniest thing I had ever encountered in my life.

It’s my childhood dream to visit the homeland of the Koala’s, even more so now that Hurricane Katrina destroyed my childhood bear. =( If you sign the petition to send me to TechEd Australia, I will in return give you the best presentation on the Visual Studio IDE you’ve ever seen. But, don’t take my word for it. In the words of one attendee from TechEd North America 2008, “I laughed, I cried, It was better than cats!”

Yes, in that clip, i’m actually reading Tip 1.1 from the Visual Studio Tips book to the Firefox fox and the Mono monkey to make you a little jealous. (Microsoft should get into the stuff animal business.)

Here’s the petition again: http://twtpoll.com/iuz95p Please sign it, and make my childhood dream come true! I don’t know how many votes i need, but i need to prove my worth. So please vote for me. (I so feel like i’m on American idol.)

My heartfelt thanks to Catherine Eibner, a Dynamics Developer Evangelist, for making this petition happen! Couldn’t have done it without you!

Head over to Scott Cate’s blog to relive the Tip of the Day series, but with videos this time. Scott has taken it upon himself to do a video for each of the 382 tips.

URL - http://scottcate.com/tricks/

RSS – http://feeds.scottcate.com/VSTricks 

Thanks again Scott for volunteering to do this!

‘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.