In my previous posts (part 1, part 2) I showed you how to create external tools and add them to a custom tool bar. In this post we will go the next logical step and add them to the context menu, so when you right-click on a file in the solution explorer (or other places) you’re tools are right there for use.
If you’ve been following along, you’ll have noticed that customizing Visual Studio in these ways is a bit cumbersome. Creating context menus are no better considering there are a ton of different menus depending on the context that you’ll have to independently configure.
Read the rest of this entry »
In my previous post I showed you how to configure your own External Tools in Visual Studio, such as a command that opens up the current document in an external text editor, or a tool that launches a custom deployment executable. External Tools by default are accessed through the Tools menu, but this is lame. In this post I’ll show you to create your own toolbar to contain your tools so they are no more than one click away. Read the rest of this entry »
Visual Studio has some deep customization options and extensibility points that many of us just ignore. Once such option is “External Tools” which allow you to create a menu item (and optional toolbar) that can run any external program you wish.
I recently had to set up a couple of new computing environments so I went through my typical routine of setting up Explorer.exe as an external tool, and while doing so I pondered a few other tools that might be useful. In this and subsequent posts, I’ll describe how to set up some simple external tools, create a custom tool bar for them and even add them to the context menu. Read the rest of this entry »
When I’m teaching the MVC boot camp, I’m always amazed at how some of the smallest things are most impressive to students. One of the most common “wow” moments I see from students not familiar with jQuery is how you can trick Visual Studio to provide IntelliSense by including the vsdoc file, but make sure it still uses the min file for performance. That can be done by including the vsdoc file in an if(false) condition like below. This ensures it will never get included in the production code, which still tricking visual studio’s tooling to import the IntelliSense.
