Visual Studio Hacks

Customize the Toolbox #27

Chapter 4, Customizing Visual Studio

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HACK

If you are building your own control, it’s easy to add a cus-

tom toolbox icon: create a 16 × 16 bitmap and add it to your

project. You will need to ensure that the name of the bitmap

is the same as the name of the control and the bitmap is set

to be an embedded resource.

Code Snippets and the Toolbox

The normal use of the toolbox includes adding and removing tabs and con-

trols, but you can also use the toolbox to store code snippets. Whether you

want to store a method call to get a connection string, a commonly used

piece of JavaScript, or an architecture-specific piece of code, the toolbox is a

great place to save those pieces of code that you constantly find yourself typ-

ing.

Before adding any code snippets to the toolbox, it is a good idea to add a

separate tab to the toolbox for your code snippets: right-click on the tool-

box and select Add Tab, then enter a name for the tab (such as

Code

Snippets

) in the text box that appears at the bottom of the toolbox.

Storing a piece of code in the toolbox is simple: select the code from the

document window and drag it over to the toolbox. After dropping the code

on the toolbox, you will see a snippet like the one shown in Figure 4-15.

This code snippet can now be dragged and dropped from the toolbox to the

document window, and the included code will be pasted into the docu-

ment. You ...