Visual Studio Hacks

Select the Best Editor #11

Chapter 2, Master the Editor

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HACK

To switch the default behavior, you need to change the settings located

under the HTML Designer folder in the Tools

➝ Options dialog. These set-

tings are shown in Figure 2-23.

On this Options screen, you can determine what view will be used for each

type of file handled by the HTML designer. Changing the radio button to

HTML View (in which you edit the raw HTML) for each of the file types

will cause Visual Studio to also use the HTML view when opening these

files. (You can later switch to design view if you like.)

Other editors. There are also editors for CSS files, resource files, and binary

files. I am not going to cover these here since they are easy to use and don’t

have any hidden features that you need to worry about.

Choosing Your Editor

Visual Studio will also select what editor it feels is best, based on the exten-

sion of the file you select, but sometimes it is beneficial to use a different edi-

tor than the Visual Studio default. To select a different editor, you need to

use the Open With command, which you can access in a couple of different

ways. When selecting a file from the Solution Explorer, right-click the file

and choose Open With from the context menu that appears. Or if browsing

for a file with the File Open dialog, first select the file, then click the arrow

on the Open button (see Figure 2-24), and choose Open With. ...