I was browsing through the web the other day and came across ScottGu's blog. There was a post about some coding demonstration and saw how the IDE was different than traditional black and white scheme we used to see (default). I was immediately inspired to take the same approach because for some reason, I tend to like darker backgrounds since it's easier on the eyes. Maybe it's just me? Anyways, I decided to take the same approach and see if I like it. After a while, the black and white theme gets old, dull and boring-- and hence the reason why I decided to make the change. The effect has been immediate and judging by the small screenshot below, you'll notice that the HTML contrasting between the attributes and main tags are apparent. I took the Visual Studio setting from
here and tweaked it a little bit so the colors stands out more. Since I just installed the new
Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1, this also gets me on a fresh start with my setup. The screen shot is a little bit dimmed and slightly different because of the image pixelation.
Minor IDE TweaksHerein, I'll share some of the small tweaks that I did to take advantage of the VS 2008 IDE.
I changed the settings to "self-close" regular ASP.NET control tags such as labels, textboxes since I like simpler and shorter hand techniques. This can be found under Text Editor>HTML>Format and in the "Tag Specific Options..." I'd rather use a simpler approach since it's a little bit cleaner. Another tweak that I did was to check the option to open a document in the "source view" since I think this defaults to split mode where the source and design view shows. This itself opens up the code file much quicker.
Under the Options>Environment, you can change the startup to
Show Empty Environment instead of having that splash window that you have to close every time. Under the Text Editor>HTML>Format, you can change the tag wrapping to wrap tags when it exceeds certain length. I set mine to
200 since I don't mind having the text go all the way to the right side without wrapping. I don't know about you but I like my regular CSS such as margins and width to be inline rather than declarative per classes. I changed this in the HTML Designer>CSS to have all the options set to
CSS (inline styles). Right off the bat, I can easily tell how the tags are formatted just by looking at the style attribute. This is a matter of preference. If you go look under the Text Editor and within each languages or "All Languages", I also check the line numbers as probably a lot of people would do.
Another cool that I've learned a few days ago is a commenting feature that acts sort of like a reminder within the Task List window. Under the Options>Environment>Task List, you'll see the "token list" that are available, but you can also define your own and set priorities. What it does is it lets you go to that line of comment where you used that keyword or token. More information can be found
here. You can easily go back to your coding "to-do" items simply by double-clicking in the task list window where comments with keywords are marked.
If you have any suggestions on how to do things better in the Visual Studio 2008 IDE, please feel free to let me know. Thank you and have a Happy Thanksgiving weekend.
// Dennis