Some Visual Studio tweaking tips!

I spend a lot of time in Visual Studio, and most of the default settings are usually ok. But I there is always something you can do to improve your experience with the IDE. This is more of a follow up to the blogpost of Gøran Hansen <a href="http://blog.goeran.no/PermaLink,guid,ab922a6a-702e-4ec8-8437-c643b5e6939c.aspx">”Pimp my Visual Studio 2008 and developer tool belt!“</a> . But this will cover some basic tweaking for people new to Visual Studio.

In this article I’ll cover some basic “tweaks” to Visual Studio:

1. Colors
2. Recent Projects
3. Default Project Location
4. Text Editor

Colors

When you spend a lot of time looking at the screen, your eyes have to work more when your screen is filled with a lot of light and contrasts. Therefore it’s a good idea to make a few changes to your codeview. So the most relaxing view your eyes could have, is a dark background with a non-contrast colors on your code/comments. There are several predefined colorsets out there, I just got a new favorite today, the one from Gørans blogpost. (Direct link to the colortheme)

Import Settings:

1. Download and unzip the file.
2. Open Visual Studio, and open “Tools->Import and Export Settings”
3. Select “Import selected environment settings”
4. Save or overwrite your current setting. I’d save em, you might want to revert later on.
5. “Browse” and locate your unzipped file. ->” Next” and “Finish” and you are done.

Manual color change:

If you want to change your colors yourself, open Visual Studio and open “Tools->Options”, then navigate to “Environment->Font and Colors”

Recent Projects

if(you == me) then you’ll probably have a lot of small projects, which you created just to test out some new things, a library or just showing “how it works” to a colleague. In that case you end of with a bunch of “unimportant” projects in your recent projects list. I think it’s annoying, so here is the fix:

Remove items

1. Run -> Regedit.exe
2. Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0\ProjectMRUList
   • 8.0 = VS 2005
   • 9.0 = VS 2008
3. Delete the list of items you don’t need, and you are done

Show more items

Even though I just show you how to remove all the unnecessary projects from the list, I still like to see more than just a few projects.
In Visual Studio: Open “Tools -> Options”, navigate to “Environment -> General”. Here you can control how many projects that will show up on your startpage. On My screen, 20 projects fits well.

Default Project storage location

Default location for your projects is “My Documents\Visual Studio 2008\Projects”. To change this open Visual Studio, go to “Tools->Options”, navigate down to “Projects and Solutions”. Here you can browse to your favorite project/code location and make it default. I prefer to have it outside of the “My Documents” folder, since sometimes the code/folder hierarchy gets a bit long. And if you use roaming user profile (like at school or work), you might get some problems. I have all my code on a different disk with automatic backup.

Text Editor

The text editor has a few useful settings you can do. Yet again, in Visual Studio, open “Tools->Options”, navigate to “Text Editor”. The options are mostly self explaining. The only thing you should notice that you have an option “All Languages”, which basically alters all the editors, regardless of what programming language you use. I always enable line numbering here.