Visual Studio,Tips & Tricks - Jeff Widmer's Blog

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How to show white space in Visual Studio: In Microsoft Word I usually have the paragraph symbol turned on to Show Hidden Formatting Symbols (white space) so that I can clearly see spaces, tabs, and other white space characters. Up until recently I had no idea that Visual Studio had the...
Posted 11 November 2009 09:19 PM by Jeff Widmer | 2 comment(s)
Filed under: Visual Studio, Tips & Tricks

How to quickly comment or uncomment lines of code in Visual Studio: When I am developing I am always trying to reduce the amount of time that my hands come off of the keyboard and have to move to the mouse. One of the frequent functions that I noticed required me to move my hand off of the keyboard to the mouse...
Posted 27 October 2009 10:37 PM by Jeff Widmer | 4 comment(s)
Filed under: Visual Studio, Tips & Tricks

How to quickly format a C# class file – Ctrl-K, Ctrl-D: In C# as you are typing in a class file the indenting of your code can easily get out of alignment making the code hard to read. Where does your class, if block, or method begin and end?? You can manually go and fix each line but there is a much...
Posted 21 October 2009 08:57 PM by Jeff Widmer | 3 comment(s)
Filed under: C#, Visual Studio, Tips & Tricks

Use Ctrl+. (period) to trigger Visual Studio’s automatic add using statement context menu: When you type class names that are missing the correct namespace reference, Visual Studio will help you out by giving you a context menu that you can use to automatically add the correct using statement to the top of your class. For instance, in the example...
Posted 20 October 2009 10:08 PM by Jeff Widmer | 1 comment(s)
Filed under: Visual Studio, Tips & Tricks

osql.exe and unicode files – how to save your sql scripts with encoding: osql.exe is a great application for running sql scripts in a batch. I use a batch file to execute multiple sql scripts that I use to rebuild my current application database from scratch. When developing a brand new application, deploying a...
Posted 14 October 2009 09:43 AM by Jeff Widmer | 2 comment(s)
Filed under: SQL Server, Visual Studio, Tips & Tricks, osql.exe, Unicode encoding

Use Alt-key to select arbitrary block of text in Visual Studio: One of the my most favorite tips/tricks for Visual Studio is the ability to copy and paste an arbitrary block on text in the Source View by pressing and holding the Alt-key while dragging your mouse. A quick example is the best way to describe it...
Posted 30 August 2009 09:31 PM by Jeff Widmer | 1 comment(s)
Filed under: Visual Studio, Tips & Tricks