The Limber Lambda

This bright young ladywoman makes it her duty to “tip” on VS on a daily basis without fail. For the most part, there isn’t anything hugely interesting, but occasionally there’s a gem.

In brief – don’t you hate it when your tabs don’t re-order so that the most recently accessed is also the first?  This has the effect that some file that you may be interested in “pops” off the right-hand side.  A small registry change ensures that tabs get re-ordered according to latest access; pretty handy–a small downside – tabs end up shifting around.

Microsoft does it again by including something really useful in their editor but neglecting to let anyone know about it.  For those of you who miss the 80-column (or n-column as the case may be) text width guide from the old Borland editors, just apply the following registry change for the same in VS 2005:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0\Text Editor]
"Guides"="RGB(192,192,192) 80"

As can be seen, the colour of the guide can be specified, as well as the number of characters at which it should appear.  Digging a little deeper, doing the following will also work; rendering multiple guides:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0\Text Editor]
"Guides"="RGB(192,192,192) 80 120"


Understand, the title is tongue-in-cheek. Visual Studio 2005 is great, but it can also be fairly frustrating. I’m referring, in this case, to a rather annoying piece of behaviour with regards to how the Solution Explorer initially presents projects. Projects are expanded by default, showing all constituent files, and naturally, if your solution contains alot of projects, each with many files, a nice, succinct overview is something you have to work hard for by explicitly (mouse-work) collapsing project nodes. Guess what? There is no way to configure this–at least not using a built-in facility. And there’s no keyboard shortcut or menu item to “collapse all” either.

The good news is … someone has written a macro for this. It seems to be heavily plagiarised but isn’t rocket science–still I’d rather copy-and-paste VB Script with my eyes closed than actually care about the aesthetics.