Visual Studio 2005 is for the new features and enhancement that make designing and implementing applications a snap. Some of these features may not be intuitive or easy to find. In this section, we will review some handy tips to enhance, show you the experience and customize your environment.
Let us go ahead and launch Visual Studio 2005.
On my computer, it is right underneath my start button, so I will go ahead and click that shortcut.
Let us go ahead and customize your IDE. What we can do here is set environment options. Go ahead and go to your Tools, Options and here you will see a list of options that you can set inside a Visual Studio 2005. Let us experiment with some of these.
One of the options I can set is changing the amount of files that I see in my recently used list. Perhaps I had multiple files that I am working with and that number exceeds the default number of 10. Let us go ahead and change that value from 10 to 20.
Another option I can change is my auto recovery settings. Click on that node, the default is two minutes. Let us say I am a fast typer and if I am writing code rapidly, I want auto recovery to save my code more frequently. Let us go ahead and change that setting from two minutes to one, that way, I can be sure that I am backed up.
Another option is to modify the startup behavior. Select Environment, Startup Node, at Startup, the default is to show the start page. What if I am using a project day in and day out and I want that project to be my default startup file? I can certainly change that here by modifying the drop down value from show start page to load last loaded solution.
Let us explore some another options.
Under my Project and Solution node, I can go ahead and click on that and I can see the locations of my project and my project templates. Let us say I store them in a specific area on my machine. In this case, I stored them on my desktop. Click on the ellipses button to bring up the browse file dialog. I will navigate to my desktop and I will select my project file that I located on my desktop. That way, when I save projects, they will automatically save to my project files on my desktop.
Another handy feature especially when you are working with large teams is enabling Line Numbers. Scroll down, go to Text Editor, and choose All Languages. Here, you will see under the display a check box for Line Numbers. Go ahead and select that and now your code will have easily referenceable line numbers that your team can share.
We do not want to save these changes now. Certainly, you are more than welcome to, but keep in mind as you follow along, your environment may look a little different than mine. I will go ahead and hit Cancel to cancel out of this changes.
Another way I can customize my environment is by customizing my Toolbar. Go ahead and select Tools, select Customize and here, I can see a list of Toolbars that I have available as well as a list of commands that I have available. Here are various commands that I can actually drag and drop to my console to create buttons. Let us go ahead and add a few to my Toolbar.
Let us say I work with the data adaptor quite often, what I can do is to go ahead and have easy access to my configured data adaptor wizard. I just go ahead and drag this to my Toolbar and just drop it right there. I thought of few more items to our Toolbar. Scroll down to Tools. As you can see, I have a list of tools such as connecting to a database or connecting to a server that I can actually add as buttons to my Toolbar.
Let us go ahead and add a few.
We will add the Code Snippets Manager. We will go ahead and add a tool to connect to the server. We will scroll down and add some external tools. Drag this over to your Toolbar as well. You can select any tools that you would like to use and customize your environment in a way that makes more sense for you.
We will go ahead and close out of this and now, I can see my tools available for my use in my Toolbar. Let us use some of these new tools.
If I click on the external tools, I can see any add-ins that are implemented i
