The team has release a new version of the tools which solve a lot of the issues, and provide a bunch more great features. Please make sure you see and use the latest version.
At Tech·Ed North America on Monday the Visual Studio Pro Power Tools were announced, and they are fantastic. A full run down of them can be found on Brian Harry’s blog. However there are some tips in the usage which may not be immediately obvious so this post will explain some additional tips.
Add Reference Dialog
The new dialog is amazing and fits the UI experience of VS2010 way better than the out of the box one. One point to be aware of is that when you hit Add that it does not close the dialog - it does mark the selected assembly and in the background it adds it. This is great for adding multiple assemblies. If you want to remove an assembly you can do it here too – just select an already added assembly (green tick) and the Add button becomes a Remove button.
Document Tab Well
This is one of the first things you will see, because the tabs are a variety of colours suddenly. How can you control this? Go to the Tools menu –> Options –> Environment –> Document Tab Well to customise the settings. Setting the preset to Visual Studio 2010 is the same as disabling it.
As a side point, if you are thinking of disabling it – before you do disable it, try the Dynamic Tab Well preset. It is very similar to the standard VS2010 tabs, but with more features added and should appeal without over killing it.
The shortcut to get to that part of help is right click on any blank space in the tab well and click Customize…
Highlight Current Line
Another one that is immediately obvious – the grey behind your current line of code. If this colour is not aligned to your colour scheme then you can tweak it using the Tools menu –> Options –> Environment –> Fonts & Colours –> Display Items –> Current Line (Extension).
To “disable” it set the background to Automatic.
Align Assignments
If this is not working for you, it could because your C# settings are stopping it. To , you must uncheck: Tools menu –> Options –> Text Editor –> C# –> Formatting –> Spacing –> Ignore spaces in declaration statements
Colourised Parameter Help
Don’t like the the colours of the new tool tips? Want them to match your theme?
You can do this via Tools menu –> Options –> Environment –> Fonts & Colours –> Display Items –> Signature Help Tooltip Background
Important to not that the foreground colour cannot be changed, only the background colour.
Move Line Up/Down Commands
Did you have something already on the Alt+↑ or Alt+↓ or maybe you want to bind to something else? You can do this in Tool (menu) –> Options –> Environment –> Keyboard. The commands are:
- Edit.MoveLineDown
- Edit.MoveLineUp
The Hack
Should you really dislike an extension or a specific extension is conflicting (tab well for instance conflicts with another tab management extension available) there is a completely unsupported hack to remove a specific feature while keeping other features on. Note that you will need to do this for EVERY update and it is unsupported, so do not bother to ask for help. It may also cause side effects to Visual Studio which cannot be foreseen. In short you had better be desperate.
Hack #1
The VSIX file is just a ZIP file, which you can open in your favourite archive tool. From there you can see the assemblies for each extension and remove them if needed.
Hack #2
When an extension is installed it is unpacked to C:\Users\<Username>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0\Extensions\ in here you will find directories for the various authors and under those the extensions. To find the Pro Power Tools go to: \Microsoft\Visual Studio 2010 Pro Power Tools\10.0.100525.1000 and you will see all the files, simply delete or move out the assembly of the feature you do not want that will disable it.