Prolific Notion » Visual Studio

Console2 – My new and improved command prompt for Windows

Simon Dingley — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 08:04:01 +0000

I am a sucker for a good looking GUI so when an opportunity presents itself to try and improve my workspace to make it more easy on the eye I will generally take it up. Recently I read a post by Scott Hanselman ‘Console2 – A Better Windows Command Prompt‘ and I immediately got myself over to SourceForge to download a copy of Console2 for myself. The project describes itself as “a Windows console window enhancement. Console features include: multiple tabs, text editor-like text selection, different background types, alpha and color-key transparency, configurable font, different window styles“.

I’m not going to cover how to configure your instance of the Console because Scott’s post already does a very good job of this, however, what I do want to share with you is my own configuration and how I have made it a bit more useful for me.

First of all I have installed Console2 into my Dropbox Tools folder so I essentially have access to it wherever I need it and with the configuration I am now used to. This is easy enough to do since Console2 has no installer you just extract the files to a location of your choice so no further detail needed here. My Console 2 Settings File is attached to this post for anyone that is interested or wants to use it as a basis for configuring your own.

The next thing I did was create a new right-click menu option in Windows to “Open Console here” which basically allows me to open a prompt at any folder location in my file system and saves a bit of time since you no longer have to navigate your folder hierarchy to get the prompt to where you want. To do this you need to create a couple of entries in your registry, simply copy and paste the below into a text file, tweak accordingly and save as a .reg file. Once saved you can double click the .reg file to insert the keys into your registry. Alternatively you can just create the keys manually through regedit. It goes without saying that if you are going to fiddle with your registry please be wise and make a backup first!

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shell\OpenConsole2Here]
@="&Open Console 2 Here..."

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shell\OpenConsole2Here\command]
@="D:\\Dropbox\\Tools\\Console2\\Console.exe -d \"%L\""

It should be noted that these keys relate to my Windows 7 Professional installation and are untested on other versions of Windows!

Credit to Scott Hanselman for the icons and the image used in this post

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Shortcut to Implement Abstract Class or Interface in Visual Studio

Simon Dingley — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 10:33:55 +0000

For me every day is a school day and every day I learn something new. Today the light shined brightly for me when I discovered a great time saving shortcut in Visual Studio to implement an Abstract Class or Interface in Visual Studio. Using the shortcut will populate all of the abstract class method signatures for you.

CTRL + > or you can use SHIFT + ALT + F10

Here is an example of a new custom Application tree I was implementing for the Umbraco CMS:

namespace ProlificNotion.Umbraco

{

public class MyNewTree : umbraco.cms.presentation.Trees.BaseTree
{

}
}

With your cursor at the end of the class signature you can then press CTRL + > or SHIFT + ALT + F10 and you will get a smart tag offering to implement the abstract class or interface, hit enter and the result is as follows:

namespace ProlificNotion.Umbraco
{
public class MyNewTree : umbraco.cms.presentation.Trees.BaseTree
{

protected override void CreateRootNode(ref umbraco.cms.presentation.Trees.XmlTreeNode rootNode)
{
throw new System.NotImplementedException();
}

public override void Render(ref umbraco.cms.presentation.Trees.XmlTree tree)
{
throw new System.NotImplementedException();
}

public override void RenderJS(ref System.Text.StringBuilder Javascript)
{
throw new System.NotImplementedException();
}
}
}

A simple example of something that can be a huge time saver particularly when the inherited class or interface has a large number of methods to implement!

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Converting a Visual Studio Class Library Project to a Web Application Project

Simon Dingley — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 20:47:40 +0000

I started working on a new Umbraco package a while ago that begain its life as a Class Library. It had been a long day and some time into the project I decided I actually needed my project to be a Web Application Project but there was no obvious way to convert between the two. I suppose I could just create a fresh new project and move my existing files into it but that would be too easy.

I opened the two project files in Notepad++ and after some trial and error discovered that if you copy the line below into your Class Library project file beneath the node and save it then re-open your project in Visual Studio you will magically have a Web Application project that you can add your custom user controls etc to.

{349c5851-65df-11da-9384-00065b846f21};{fae04ec0-301f-11d3-bf4b-00c04f79efbc}

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Recreate .designer files in Visual Studio 2008

Simon Dingley — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 22:06:19 +0000

For some reason or another I ended up with a corrupt default.aspx.designer.cs file in a recent web project, a quick check with my best friend(Google) and the solution it seemed couldn’t be easier. Delete the .designer file and right click the .aspx file and select “Convert to Web Application”…were you expecting more? Sorry, that’s all there is to it!

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