Visual Studio Hacks

Combine the Visual Studio Command Prompt and the Command Window #98

Chapter 13, Enhancing Visual Studio

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HACK

Even on a large source file, Auto-Collapse takes only a few seconds to

traverse from start to end. This is a great feature to use on source code that

you are not familiar with; it allows you to remove the maximum amount of

code from view while still being able to peek inside blocks, all helping you to

grasp the purpose of the code you are examining.

—Chris Nurse

HACK

#98

Combine the Visual Studio Command Prompt

and the Command Window Hack #98

The Command Prompt and Command Window are addictive individually.

Combine these two and you may never reach for the mouse again.

The VSCMDShell power toy can be used to combine two of the more valu-

able parts of Visual Studio, the Visual Studio Command Prompt

[Hack #77] and

the Command Window

[Hack #46]. Since these tools are similar, someone at

Microsoft had the great idea to write a window that combines the function-

ality of both of these tools in one place. Just having the Visual Studio Com-

mand Prompt inside the IDE is valuable—when you add the fact that you

can execute Visual Studio commands, it becomes invaluable.

The first step is to download and install the VSCMDShell power toy from

http://workspaces.gotdotnet.com/VSCMDShell.

Once you have downloaded and installed the power toy, you will find a new

menu item on the Tools menu called VSCMDShell Window that will launch

the window shown in Figure 13-19.

As you can see, the window looks just like the Visual Studio Command

Prompt, because it is. You can do anything you can do in the normal Visual

Studio Command Prompt in this window. You can run any of the utilities

discussed throughout this book or even just use it as a normal command

prompt.

Figure 13-18. If, Select, and Try blocks collapsed