The Sandcastle team just announced a new toy for users of Visual Studio, the Power Toys for Visual Studio Pack Installer. This is a unified installer for the various Power Toys released; no more downloading a dozen installers to get what you want, this one does it all. If you like pushing VS to be all it can be, this is worth looking at.
The coding guidelines at my job have a rather interesting requirement: code must be wrapped at 100 characters. If you fail to meet this on any line of code, you fail the code review. In the year I’ve worked at this company I’ve learned to guess how long a line is quite well. As of today, no more guessing.
Here’s a quick registry hack to add a vertical line in the editor at any column you wish, just double click the REG file and you’re set. The contents of the file look something like this:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\
VisualStudio\8.0\Text Editor]
"Guides"="RGB(128, 128, 128) 100"
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\
VisualStudio\7.1\Text Editor]
"Guides"="RGB(128, 128, 128) 100"
The setting works something like this: The RGB() part defines the color of the line, the number at the end defines the column the line is displayed at. If your style defines a limit on the length of a line, this is a great way to see at a glance if you’re going too long.
Note: This adds the key for both Visual Studio 2003 and Visual Studio 2005.
Update: The original REG file I linked to had a formatting error that caused the data to import improperly. I’ve replaced the file with a working copy.
Seeing slowdowns in large VB 2005 projects? Well, I think I just found the answer. There’s now a QFE released that may help address these issues. One of the applications I maintain is a 25,000 line solution made up of 9 projects, I’m hoping this fix will resolve the issues we’ve seen compiling it (not to mention the frequent compiler crashes).
Here’s the list of symptoms addressed:
- You experience a slow response time when you use single-step debugging. For example, the response time is slow when you press F10 to step into a line of code.
- You experience a slow response time when the Error List or the Task List is updated by Visual Studio 2005.
- You experience a slow response time when you use the IntelliSense feature.
Once I hear back from Microsoft support, I’ll post details if it makes any difference.
