As a follow-up to my post about Visual Studio Pro Power Tools, I advise you to take a look at the following post from the VS team: Document Well 2010 Plus: Hidden Options.
It provides great options for further improving the appearance of tabs in Visual Studio 2010.
I've activated several options straight away, for example to hide the Pin button, to highlight the selected tab, to maintain tabs pinned, and to have tabs pinned appear in original order.
Here is what my tabs look like now:
- No Pin button (right-click is here for that)
- No Close button (CTRL+F4, middle-click, and the button at the end of the tab well are enough)
- No lost space (Min. tab size set to 20)
- Current tab highlighted
I'm just back from the OData Roadshow with Douglas Purdy and Jonathan Carter. Paris was the last location of seven cities around the world.
If there was something you wanted to know about OData, that was the place to be!
These guys gave a great tour around OData.
I learned things I didn't know about OData and I was able to give a demo of Sesame to the audience.
More ideas and use cases popping-up!
I have deferred the post about how Sesame is built in favor of publishing a new update.
This new release offers major features such as the ability to quickly filter and sort data, select columns, and create hyperlinks to OData.
Filtering, sorting, selecting
In order to filter data, you just have to use the filter row, which becomes available when you click on the funnel button:
You can then type some text and select an operator:
The data grid will be refreshed immediately after you apply a filter.
It works in the same way for sorting. Clicking on a column will immediately update the query and refresh the grid.
Note that multi-column sorting is possible by using SHIFT-click:
Viewing data is not enough. You can also view and copy the query string that returns that data:
One more thing you can to shape data is to select which columns are displayed. Simply use the Column Chooser and you'll be done:
Again, this will update the data and query string in real time:
Linking to Sesame, linking to OData
The other main feature of this release is the ability to create hyperlinks to Sesame. That's right, you can ask Sesame to give you a link you can display on a webpage, send in an email, or type in a chat session.
You can get a link to a connection:
or to a query:
You'll note that you can also decide to embed Sesame in a webpage...
Here are some sample links created via Sesame:
I'll give more examples in a post to follow.
There are many more minor improvements in this release, but I'll let you find out about them by yourself :-)
Please try Sesame Data Browser now and let me know what you think!
PS: if you use Sesame from the desktop, please use the "Remove this application" command in the context menu of the destkop app and then "Install on desktop" again in your web browser. I'll activate automatic updates with the next release.
Microsoft has just published a new free extension for Visual Studio 2010 that provides an improved Add Reference dialog, an improved tab bar, and much more.
The new Add Reference dialog comes with a long-awaited feature: it's now searchable!
The tab bar allows you to display the close button at the end of the bar and not on each tab. It can also sort tabs by project and alphabetically. Tab color can vary by project or according to regular expressions.
I'll let you discover about the other features by yourself (HTML Copy, Triple Click, Current Line Highlighting, etc.).
The name of the extension is Visual Studio Pro Power Tools. I believe it's main features will come out-of-the-box with the next version of Visual Studio.