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Launching your ASP.NET web applications on multiple browsers at the same time from Visual Studio(2012)

Admin — Sun, 12 May 2013 07:00:00 +0400

Visual Studio 2010 offered option to view a particular .aspx page on multiple browsers when you right-click the file and chose Browse With… but it didn’t provide storing the setting and allowing to launch the web page on multiple browsers at the same time when you execute every time.

In this article we will see how this feature is enhanced in Visual Studio 2012; you can set multiple browsers as default and store this setting permanently and when you Debug(F5) you will get a dialog to choose the browser you’d like to debug with or when you Execute without debugging (Ctrl+F5) you will be able to launch the web application in multiple browsers.

As you may have noted from my earlier article about Visual Studio 2012 new features, Visual Studio 2012 has a browser drop down that lets you select the browser that will be used to launch your ASP.NET web application when you debug it (F5) as shown below, as I mentioned in my article, this was achievable in earlier Visual Studio versions via other not-so-quick menu/context menu commands.

If you click the Browse With… menu option shown above, you will be presented with the below dialog.

This window shows all the names of the browsers installed in your machine. As indicated by the dialog, you can select more than one browser and click Browse to launch the web application in the chosen browsers, this will not launch your web application in Debug mode.

Also, you can select multiple browsers and click Set as Default to make this setting permanent, so that whenever you execute the web application without debugging(Ctrl+F5) it will be launched in these browsers at the same time. The Execute command in Visual Studio 2012 will be captioned as Multiple Browsers instead of the default browser name.

If you click the Execute command(which will execute your web application in debug mode) you will get the below prompt.

You can choose which browser you wish to use for debugging.

I think this particular feature will be a productivity enhancer for web developers who work on achieving browser compatibility and tackle issues arising when providing multiple browser support for their ASP.NET Web Applications.

Happy Coding !

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isin

Visual Studio 2012 New Features of the IDE - better late than never ;-)

Admin — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 07:00:00 +0400

I am making this post thinking “Better late than never”, as I was supposed to make this post a long time ago, actually in the beta period of Visual Studio 2012, like I did with Visual Studio 2010, unfortunately I was held up with other stuff, personal and work related. This post remained as partially completed in my blog’s drafts for a long time which I took and finished.

Note: This post talks about the Visual Studio 2012’s IDE new features. All non-IDE features, new language features, .net framework 4.5 features, new type of app development support like Windows 8 metro app development and specific code editor enhancements will be discussed in future posts.

So with that in mind, here are the new features of Visual Studio 2012’s IDE..

Dark Color Theme for code editor and IDE windows

Visual Studio 2012 provides out of the box option to have a White on Black color scheme, Dark AKA White on Black color schemes have become choice of many developers as many have realized that they are easy on the eyes.

Dark Theme (click to enlarge)

Light Theme (click to enlarge)

Quick Launch – search the Visual Studio commands/menu options you need and locate it quickly

Seems Visual Studio has more than a whopping 4000 commands, apart from the frequently used commands, it wouldn’t be practical to remember most of the commands, hence Visual Studio 2012 has a cool feature called Quick Launch - Ctrl+Q located in the top right corner in the Visual Studio 2012 IDE as shown below.

You can start typing few letters of the command you are looking for and Quick Launch will provide auto-suggest with commands that starts with the letters you have typed.

It also shows the shortcut keys for each command which is pretty neat.

You can also use the Quick Launch command-category shortcut keywords as listed below to narrow down the command search, ex: “@opt project”.

Pin Tabs(files) that you use often to the left side of the Tab-well

This is a feature found in Productivity Power Tools for Visual Studio 2010 this allows you to pin tabs that you want to remain open and easily accessible. When you pin a tab it is stuck to the left most corner of the tab-well.

Search option in IDE windows

Many of the windows in Visual Studio 2012 will have a search option including Solution Explorer and Toolbox.

Find and Replace window changes

A minimalistic approach has been taken in designing the new find window present in Visual Studio 2012. The advantage is that the find window will not hide the code window much. Some may miss the old find window which shows shortcuts to turn on/off options like Match Case, Match whole word, etc. This resembles the search option found in modern browsers.

Preview Tab

Visual Studio 2012 provides you a preview of a file when you select it in the Solution Explorer. Earlier if you want to examine the file contents of a file, you have to open it and see, if you are trying to locate something (and if you can’t use find command for some reason) then you would have opened a lot of files messing up the workspace with lot of open tabs. Now with this preview tab, when you select a file it is opened and placed in the right corner of the tab-well as shown below and when you select another file the currently selected file’s content is shown in the same preview tab.

If you want to keep the file open in a normal tab instead of showing in the preview tab then you can click the Keep Open icon as shown below.

This preview tab feature also gives you another behavior which helps you to keep the IDE clean with only the files you like to keep open. Whenever you are debugging and stepping into your code Visual Studio will open other files when there is a chunk of code that is called by your main program file, and if there are lot of files involved then all of them are opened in the end of your debugging (stepping through) session. Now in Visual Studio 2012, the preview tab is utilized when you step through the code for which another file has to be loaded, once the other file’s statements are completed then the preview tab is automatically closed.

Browser Drop Down

The browser drop down shown below provides a quick way to start your ASP.NET web application on any of the browsers installed on your machine, earlier you’d have to do this via other not-so-quick menu/context menu commands.

Create Multiple Solution Explorer Instances

Nowadays, in most solutions you work on, the number of projects present are many, but you work only with few of them depending upon the role you play in the project. Visual Studio 2012 gives you a new feature of creating Solution explorer instances showing only a project or folder containing a set of files when you right click them as shown below.

Page Inspector

Page inspector is another new feature in Visual Studio 2012, it allows you to examine the html/css of a web page similar to IE Developer Tool Bar or Firefox’s Firebug add-on.

You can inspect a HTML element’s HTML and CSS, make edits and try out how it will look in the browser on the fly.

(click to enlarge)

IIS Express replaces the ASP.NET Development server

In Visual Studio 2012, IIS Express replaces the ASP.NET Development server, more about IIS Express here.

HTML5 & CSS3 support

The Visual Studio 2012 editor supports development of HTML 5 and CSS 3 web sites by providing appropriate intellisense and code snippets, will write a future article about this.

Unmodified Visual Studio 2010 project files

Visual Studio 2010(SP1) project files are not converted when opened in Visual Studio 2012. So if some of your team members use Visual Studio 2010 and you use Visual Studio 2012 for some reason, then you all can share the same solution/project file without converting to Visual Studio 2012’s project file format.

Single compact toolbar for common commands

In Visual Studio 2012, a single compact toolbar provides you with enough commands that you frequently use. This provides more screen real estate to show the code editor.

Visual Studio 2010’s toolbar:

Visual Studio 2012’s new compact toolbar:

Code Editor Enhancements

With every release of Visual Studio the code editor is a primary component which will have lot of new features added to it; which will help the developers improve their productivity. Likewise, in Visual Studio 2012 there are good number of new features added to it.

I will post a future article covering significant new features of Visual Studio 2012’s code editor, but I couldn’t resist talking about one exciting new feature that’s available when you edit CSS files in Visual Studio 2012. As shown below you get a color picker when you enter a CSS style element which requires a HTML color code as its value.

Conclusion

I have listed some of the significant Visual Studio 2012 New Features of IDE, let me know if I missed anything in the comments.

Happy Coding !

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Easiest way to Generate Insert Script in SQL Server

admin — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 07:00:00 +0400

We all know that there is no handy built-in command for generating insert statements for the data present in a table in SQL Server (apart from issuing a Generate Scripts… command on the Database and choosing to Script Data also).

There is this tool called SSMS Tools pack which I am using for years that provides a handy way to generate scripts for various purposes including Insert statements when you just right click the table for which you need the scripts.

You can get the complete set of features provided by the tool here.

I’ll try to post about other cool features of SSMS Tools Pack in future.

Recently I have moved my blog to a new webhost and there are some issues..

Admin — Fri, 23 Nov 2012 07:00:00 +0400

Some of my posts are missing, so I am locating and moving them correctly here,

Just in case you have got it wrong..i meant, moved to new host not a new URL...

Want the dark font color scheme in Visual Studio 2010/2008 ?

admin — Tue, 20 Nov 2012 07:00:00 +0400

If you like the dark color scheme available in Visual Studio 2012 and would be happy to have the same in your Visual Studio 2010/2008, you can have it for at least the code editor font colors by downloading the themes from studiostyl.es. (Note that white-on-black (dark color scheme) is easy on your eyes than usual black-on-white)

I was wondering if anyone could have made a theme based on Visual Studio 2012 and went to studiostyl.es and searched then got couple of dark themes based on Visual Studio 2012 code editor font colors.

One seems to be made using Visual Studio 11(2012) beta, you can get it here. I think this one looks more accurate.

..and the other one made using Visual Studio 2012 you can get it here.

Prevent cutting or copying blank lines in Visual Studio

Admin — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 07:00:00 +0400

I hope you know that we are not required to select a line to cut or copy it in Visual Studio, you can just keep the caret in a line and press Ctrl + C or Ctrl + X and the text in the line will be copied to your clipboard and you can insert this line anywhere in your code by pressing Ctrl + V.

It will also copy a blank line, but people use Ctrl + X command to delete blank lines and some may find this as an issue as they didn’t intend to copy the blank line and also it will clear the previously copied item in the clipboard.

It is surprising as usual to find that Visual Studio team has thought out this and provided a setting which prevents the copying of blank lines, and Cut command will just delete the blank lines.

I found this when I recently bumped into the setting in Visual Studio, in Text Editor > All Languages called "Apply Cut or Copy commands to blank lines when there is no selection".

Visual Studio 2010 Extension for collapsing solution explorer items

Admin — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 07:00:00 +0400

I have recently realised how folks get significantly uncomfortable and could also loose little amount of productivity speed when navigating Solution Explorer which is in a state of mess due to randomly expanded and collapsed Solution Explorer items, it surely causes at least a tiny amount of lack of clarity.

The basic TreeView control or Tree control is a common windows control found in many places in Windows OS, including Windows Explorer. The same is found in Visual Studio’s Solution Explorer, for those who are not aware; this control supports some keyboard shortcuts, I mean whether you are in Windows Explorer or Visual Studio Solution Explorer you can select a node’s parent and use these shortcuts.

+ (plus) --> Expand

- (minus) --> Collapse

* (asterick) --> If you would like to expand recursively a particular item's child items

But there is no shortcut to collapse recursively.

Collapse Selection in Solution Explorer extension is available for Visual Studio 2010 that adds an icon to the Solution Explorer(shown below), clicking which recursively collapses the child items. You can press Ctrl + Alt + Num(-) - numeric keypad’s '-' to use it. This extension is better than the functionality in “PowerCommand for Visual Studio 2010” extension, as explained in the above link.

Have you tried AutoHotkey tool ?

admin — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 07:00:00 +0400

AutoHotkey is a great FREE and open-source tool you can use to create hotkeys and assign them to commands that you can execute on your system. You are asked to create a script file with commands and then open it in the AutoHotkey program to use it. Commands are executed based on the hotkeys assigned to them in the script.

In the script, you can specify simple commands like the one shown below.

#n::Run Notepad

The above command launches Notepad.

# stands for Windows key, ^ for Control key, ! for Alt and + for shift

You can find more commands and general usage info about AutoHotkey in the tutorial page here.

Visual Studio Wallpapers to decorate your desktop!

Admin — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 07:00:00 +0400

I was doing a search for visual studio logo to use in a presentation and I stumbled upon a site called vs2010wallpapers.com, and found some great wallpapers built by the community and thought of sharing with you. You too can create some and submit...

(Click to go to the site)

Find more on the website..

Try jsFiddle.net, it’s cool

admin — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 07:00:00 +0400

Whenever someone explains some issue they are facing by sending some snippets of code which contains HTML with Javascript or CSS. I use this cool tool called jsFiddle.net and paste the code they send me in the relevant boxes for HTML, Javascript & CSS in the site and work on the issue.

I do this even if I have the full file set of code in which the issue is present in one part of the code set, this helps much in issue isolation.

So checkout jsFiddle.net!