Visual Studio Hacks

Enhance the Tabs in Visual Studio #23

Chapter 3, Navigating Visual Studio

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HACK

be executed. Figure 3-17 shows some of my favorite settings, making undo

and redo easily accessible on the Back and Forward buttons, and also put-

ting BuildSolution on the middle button. You can configure the mouse to

execute whatever commands make sense for you.

These are the same commands that you use in the Com-

mand window

[Hack #46] and when creating keyboard short-

cuts

[Hack #24]. Any command that you can use from the

command window or assign to a keyboard shortcut can be

assigned to one of your mouse buttons.

Just as when working with shortcut keys, you can set the scope of your com-

mand assignments. Using the drop-down labeled “Use this mouse shortcut

in:”, you can set the scope of your command. The available scope settings

are Global, HTML Source Editor, HTML Designer, and Source Editor.

When determining scope, the more specific settings will override the global

settings. You might have the middle button configured to be BuildSolution

at the global level, but set to be OpenFile in the source editor. This means

that the setting for the source editor will override the global settings; if you

click the middle button on your mouse in source code view, the OpenFile

command will be called.

The VSMouseBindings power toy is easy to download, easy to use, and can

definitely make it easier to move around in Visual Studio.

HACK

#23

Enhance the Tabs in Visual Studio Hack #23

Visual Studio’s tabs can get crowded. Use a free add-in that can cut the

number of tabs in half.

One of the more frustrating things about Visual Studio is that, when you

have a dozen or so files open, you’ve got double that for files having multi-

ple tabs for code-behind or design, and you end up with a huge list of tabs

that you have to navigate through. This is time consuming and somewhat

annoying. There is a freely available add-in that works to alleviate some of

this pain, though. The add-in, called VSTabs and written by Jonathon

Payne, can be downloaded from http://www.zero-one-zero.com/vs.

This tool is referred to as a Technical Preview by its author.

For the most part, this add-in works perfectly, but you may

encounter a bug or two. Luckily, the code for the add-in is

available, so if you want to fix the bug yourself, you can do

so.

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Chapter 3, Navigating Visual Studio

#23 Enhance the Tabs in Visual Studio

HACK

Once you have downloaded and installed the add-in, you will see a new tab

along the top of the document window. The new tab can be seen in

Figure 3-18.

Notice how the new tab groups the design view and the .cs view for Form1

under a single tab. You can switch between the two by simply clicking on

that section of the tab, and that document will be loaded. The tab control

will group documents under the same tab whenever there are two views for

the same file—this includes ASP.NET pages, Windows Forms, and web ser-

vices.

This add-in also adds another piece of functionality. It allows you to close a

tab by clicking on it with the middle mouse button. If you are a user of the

Firefox browser, you are probably already familiar with this type of func-

tionality—you can middle-click on a tab in that browser, and it will close

the tab. This is another great timesaving feature, since you no longer need to

select the tab and then move your mouse over to the Close button, but can

instead simply middle-click on the tab.

This is a quick and easy add-in to install and start using right away.

Figure 3-18. VSTabs