Archives - Tag: Visual Studio
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Adapting Visual Studio code styling differences for open source project contribution
Background
Today, while incorporating Lee Dumond’s MVC Route/URL Generation Unit Tester into a project, I found a desire to contribute some code I thought would make the package easier to use. Unfortunately, the project code formatting looks nothing like my preferred conventions (some form of 1TBS, I guess). Until Visual Studio offers a way to distribute code style settings to source control consumers easily, I needed a different option.
While preparing demos for a mobile web development talk for the Cheyenne Computer Professionals group, I stumbled on Mike Minutillo’s tip for running a “demo” instance of Visual Studio where I could sandbox my presentation settings optimized for an elderly VGA projector. This sparked an workaround idea for dealing with multiple formatting settings of various projects I may work on.
Rather than force my conventions on the project (generally not acceptable) or give up on my own style (generally not acceptable), I decided to try using a “demo” instance of Visual Studio with that projects styling conventions set.
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Closing and Re-opening tabs in Visual Studio with Ctrl+W
Visual Studio 2017 Undo-Close Update: The Productivity Power Tools have spun off into a bunch of more-focused extensions. To get Undo Close in Visual Studio 2017, you will want the Power Commands extension now.
Visual Studio 2013 Undo-Close Update: Since the prior options for re-opening closed tabs fell apart with the release of Visual Studio 2013, you will need the newly released Productivity Power Tools 2013.
Update: now with the ability to re-open closed tabs with Ctrl+Shift+T. This also allows you to re-open tabs closed by a project file reload, which is fantastic!
Ever tried to close a tab in Visual Studio 2010/2012 with Ctrl+W. If so, you find yourself selecting the current word in your text editor (Edit.SelectCurrentWord). I don’t use that shortcut, though I could see it being handy over my usual Ctrl+Shift+Right-/Left-Arrow. I do, however, use Ctrl+W to close windows/tabs in just about every other program I use. In order to make that shortcut work for your Visual Studio editing, you just need to assign it to File.Close instead.
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MonoTouch Programming in Visual Studio
TL;DR
Never underestimate the little time sinks of switching between IDEs regularly. To write MonoTouch code in Visual Studio 2010 (debug/deploy still requires MonoDevelop on a Mac), go get VSMonoTouch. If you have any issues getting it going, you may need to toss in some project file tweaks.
- Set it to not reference mscorlib.dll
- Set the
System.Web.Servicesreference to version 2.0.5.0 (and likely any others that may conflict with the latest .NET runtime assemblies).
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Making MonoDevelop for Mac (or Xamarin Studio) more like Visual Studio
If I were only living in the land of MonoDevelop, I probably wouldn’t care. I stil spend a large amount of time using Visual Studio, though, and switching contexts becomes very difficult when the IDEs are so different. While I haven’t gone as far as to swap the command and alt keys to match keyboard behavior on Windows, I do try to unite things as much as possible.
If you are simply looking for a list of the default MonoDevelop keyboard shortcuts to learn, check out something more like this post from Dan Quirk.