Most developers I know are pretty anal about the formatting of their source code. I used to think I was pretty obsessive compulsive about it, but then I joined Microsoft and faced a whole new level of OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder). For example, many require all using statements to be sorted and unused statements to be removed, which was something I never cared much about in the past. There’s no shortcut that I know of for removing unused using statements. Simply right click in the editor and select Organize Usings > Remove and Sort in the context menu. ...
You probably don’t need me to tell you that Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 has been released as it’s been blogged to death all over the place. Definitely check out the many blog posts out there if you want more details on what’s included. This post will focus more on what Visual Studio 2010 means to ASP.NET MVC and vice versa. Important: If you installed ASP.NET MVC for Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1, make sure to uninstall it (and VS10 Beta 1) before installing Beta 2. In the box baby! Well one of the first things...
UPDATE: Updated the registry settings per James Curran’s comment. Thanks James! One of the most useful registry hacks I use on a regular basis is one Robert McLaws wrote, the “ASP.NET 2.0 Web Server Here” Shell Extension. This shell extension adds a right click menu on any folder that will start WebDev.WebServer.exe (aka Cassini) pointing to that directory. I recently had to repave my work machine and I couldn’t find the .reg file I created that would recreate this shell extension. When I brought up Robert’s page, I noticed that the settings he has are out...
I used to find the smart tag really annoying in Visual Studio because it is such a small target to hit with the mouse. Silly me, trying to expand a smart tag with a mouse. When you highlight the tag with your mouse, it tells you that the keyboard combination of ALT + SHIFT + F10 will expand the menu. What it doesn’t tell you is that there’s a two key combination that will also expand it. I learned this one from Karen Liu of the C# IDE team who also happens to have a blog...