Blog : VSCommands 2010

VSCommands 3.7.0.7 Released!

admin | June 5, 2011 | 0 Comments

New in this release:

File Structure: Added ability to synchronize outlining with text editor
File Structure: Added ability to collapse File Structure tree
File Structure: Performance improvements
Bug Fix: Unable to manually refresh File Structure when file processing on file open and in background has been disabled.
Bug Fix: License file cannot be loaded when set to ReadOnly

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VSCommands 3.7.0.6 Released!

admin | May 29, 2011 | 0 Comments

New in this release:

File Structure

File processing settings have been moved from IDE Enhancements tab to new Text Editor tab.
New settings allow you to choose to process files in background (throttled updates after edits), on file open and on file save.
Currently only C# and Xml documents have all these options enabled by default. Visual Basic and C++ files will be processed only when when opened for a first time.

You can also specify the lines of code limit after which no processing will be done to files.

File processing and in turn File Structure window can now be refreshed on demand using refresh button located in a top right corner of the File Structure window:

Settings and Options Page

Settings are no longer available from Tools | Options | VSCommands 2010 options page.
Instead, they can be accessed from Tools | VSCommands | Options menu.

This change is caused by poor usability of default options window provided by Visual Studio which is a modal dialog and it cannot be resized:

New Settings window can be docked just like any other non modal window in Visual Studio.

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VSCommands 3.7.0.4 Released!

admin | May 16, 2011 | 0 Comments

What a day! Last 24 hours were really busy here with several issues reported about new File Structure feature.
While most of these problems have been fixed now (big thanks to everyone who reported them!) a very important lesson has been learned – Always provide option to turn off new features!
Looking back it seems so obvious and while VSCommands could get away without it in the past it is not going to work anymore with rapidly growing user base and over 10k downloads in a first day after last release.
Ability to turn off new features is definitely going to be a pattern to be followed in the future.

But going back to what’s new:

Editing Visual Basic files should no longer hang Visual Studio
Code files processing can be disabled from Tools | VSCommands | Options | IDE Enhancements | Text Editor

This setting will work on newly opened documents

We need your feedback!

Suggest new features and vote for existing ideas at vscommands.com/community
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VSCommands 3.7.0.3 Released!

admin | May 16, 2011 | 0 Comments

Thanks everyone for very quick feedback and suggestions.
Based on your input following bugs in File Structure feature has been fixed:

Unhandled exception when opening some .h files
File Structure not showing for some .vb files
Loading of initial parsing result is now much quicker

Thanks again!

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VSCommands 3.7.0.0 Released!

admin | May 14, 2011 | 0 Comments

New in this release:

File Structure Window

The File Structure window allows you to see what code elements are part of current file and easily navigate to their declarations (double click).
File Structure can be activated from Tools | VSCommands | File Structure and it is fully movable/dockable so you can position it just like any other window inside Visual Studio.

Following file types are supported at the moment

C# (.cs)
VB.Net (.vb)
C++ (.cpp, .h)
Xml (.xml + any xml based file format)
Xaml (.xaml)
Config files (.config, .clientconfig)

Support for other file types (such as .css) will be added soon.

web.config

app.config – User Settings

WCF Configuration in .ClientConfig

XAML – Resource Dictionary

XAML – Control Template

XAML – User Control

C++

XML

Code files processing can be disabled from Tools | VSCommands | Options | IDE Enhancements | Text Editor

This setting will work on newly opened documents

We need your feedback!

This is the first release of this feature and additional improvements will be released in next few weeks.
At the moment parsing of files is done on a very low priority thread and has initial delay of 5 seconds,
so it may take anything between 5 to 10 seconds before you see first results in File Structure window after you open a new file.
This will be adjusted in next releases.

Don’t forget to suggest new features and vote for existing ideas at vscommands.com/community
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VSCommands 3.6.9.0 Released!

admin | April 27, 2011 | 0 Comments

New in this release:

Silverlight breakpoints support (Lite)

Silverlight 5 Beta has been released earlier this month with plenty of great new features. One of the most anticipated changes is the ability to set breakpoints on bindings in xaml.

VSCommands Lite now provides a quick way to set breakpoints on all bindings and clear all breakpoints in xaml files.
As a bonus you can also set breakpoints on bindings with a condition that code execution will break only when binding has failed.

Debug Output Formatting (Pro)

Add custom rules to define how Debug Output text is formatted.

Just add a regular expression pattern and select format type (Verbatim, Information, Warning, Error, Strong, Weak)

Next time you debug your application Debug Output Window will format your messages.

You can add new patterns from Tools | VSCommands | Options | IDE Enhancements | Debug

and modify styling from Tools | Options | Environment | Fonts and Colors | VSCommands.DebugOutput.*

Friendly Solution Name – Global Setting (Lite)

VSCommands 3.6.8.0 was released with ability to set friendly name for solutions which is of great help when you work on different branches of the same project.

It can display branch name in Visual Studio window title bar

Solution Explorer

and when alt-tabbing between windows or when using peek feature of Windows 7

One of the most requested additions to this feature was the ability to have a global friendly name pattern which can be set once for all solutions.

This can be now achieved from Tools | VSCommands | Options | IDE Enhancements | Solution

This pattern will be stored in local windows registry instead of solution file and can be overridden by solution specific setting

Xaml Keywords highlighting (Pro)

Previous versions of VSCommands allowed marking of XAML specific constructs such as bindings or static and dynamic resources to make them easier to spot

New version extends this functionality by allowing you to apply custom format to xaml keywords.

By default they will be displayed using bold font

but you can change the format at any time from Tools | Options | Environment | Fonts and Colors where you will find three new items: VSCommands.Xaml.Binding, VSCommands.Xaml.DynamicResource and VSCommands.Xaml.StaticResource.

You now also have better control of which parts of this feature are enabled from Tools | VSCommands | Options | IDEEnhancements

Visual Studio Unhandled Exceptions (Lite)

Have you ever experienced a silent crash of Visual Studio where IDE just disappears without any warning?
It is extremely hard to find a source of such crash when you have several extensions and SDKs installed on your dev machine.
VSCommands Lite will now try to help in such situations by monitoring unhandled exceptions and providing additional system information to help you in reporting these problems to extension developers or Visual Studio dev team.

Once unhandled exception occurs you will be presented with a dialog box containing information about exception, installed extensions and local system setup.

Note that Visual Studio will exit after you close this dialog because starting from .Net 2.0 unhandled exceptions cause applications to terminate.
You can change this default behavior by adding legacyUnhandledExceptionPolicy to devenv.exe.config file as described on msdn.
This setting will make sure that Visual Studio doesn’t terminate so you can continue working, but it’s advised to immediately save your work and restart IDE anyway since it may be in unstable state.

Other Changes

Group Items – fixed bug introduced in previous version which prevented group items feature from working
Group Items – performance improvement – group items will now perform much quicker than before
Other minor fixes

We need your feedback!

Suggest new features and vote for existing ideas at vscommands.com/community
Follow @vscommands on Twitter or rate us in Visual Studio Gallery!

You can now get to our feedback forum directly from Visual Studio:

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VSCommands 3.6.8.3 Released!

admin | April 14, 2011 | 0 Comments

New in this release:

Fixed issue with Build Summary where Misc Folder was counted as a ‘skipped’ project
Fixed issue with Xml highlighting of key attributes where some attributes were no longer highlighted
Fixed issue with performance of Html files
Friendly Solution Name will now update Visual Studio window title to reflect states such as Running or Debugging
Friendly Solution Name will now show the title of currently open document if no solution has been loaded
Start without debugging – working directory is now correctly set to the folder of an exe file
Start without debugging – project build will be run if exe file does not exist or is not in use (would never try to build before)

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VSCommands 3.6.8.0 Released!

admin | April 10, 2011 | 0 Comments

New in this release:

Start Without Debugging (Lite)

New option available in Debug context menu will simply launch compiled version of your project or external program if configured in project properties.

Unlike Start Without Debugging command available in Visual Studio, this new feature works on any selected project (VS version works on startup projects only) and will not try to recompile your sources, so it will work even if instance of your application is already running.

Friendly Solution Name (Lite)

This feature will be useful for developers who often work on different branches of the same project at the same time.

This can quickly become frustrating because there is no quick way of finding which branch is open in which instance of Visual Studio.

Let’s say that you opened same solution from two different branches:

Now when you alt-tab between windows or use peek feature of windows 7 there is no way of telling which branch is opened in which Visual Studio instance:

There is also no visual clue in Visual Studio window itself once it’s open.

Friendly Solution Name feature allows you to specify a friendlier name for your solution which can be based on folder structure.

All you have to do is to specify a friendly name pattern and regex to extract branch name from solution path (new properties available on Solution node in Solution Explorer). Regex can contain any number of named groups which can be later referenced back in Friendly Name by using {groupName} placeholder:

VSCommands will then display this friendly name in the title of Visual Studio main window making it easy to see when you alt-tab between windows

or when you use peek feature of Windows 7

It will also add Friendly Name to Solution Explorer title bar

Open (Shell Command) (Pro)

This feature allows you to interact with files not supported natively by Visual Studio directly from Solution Explorer by exposing default shell open action for these files (such as Merge on .reg or execute on .bat files)

Solution Properties

Support for Web Application projects added

Select Folder Dialogs

VSCommands will no longer use old dialogs for folder selection when running on Windows Vista or Windows 7:

They all have been replaced with new, more user friendly versions:

Bug Fixes:

Show Assembly Details – fixed issue where data of some assemblies could not be retrieved and window was never shown
XAML Highlighting – fixed issue where self binding was not recognised
XAML Highlighting – fixed issue where referencing static converter was breaking the highlight
Tool Windows – fixed issue where tool windows provided by VSCommands did not initialize properly after Visual Studio restart

We need your feedback!

Suggest new features and vote for existing ideas at vscommands.com/community

Follow @vscommands on Twitter or rate us in Visual Studio Gallery!

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VSCommands 3.6.7.1 Released!

admin | March 3, 2011 | 0 Comments

New in this release:

Accidental Drag & Drop detection now works with Website projects
Colors Highlighting no longer highlights first three characters of #define
Reload All Projects and Project Modification Detected now works when a project and solution have the same name
Debug As Different User / Administrator now works with class libraries and makes use of Start External Application project setting

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