For those those who have no idea what I’m writing about here’s a small brief: Launchy is a keyboard launcher loosely based on Quicksilver for Mac, and it’s a highly productive tool that allows, among many other useful tricks, to quickly launch all your favorite tools with just a couple of clicks, while avoiding a crowded Start Menu (I hardly use it nowadays).

Following the Lifehacker’s article on Launchy I though to post a little tweak targeted software developers, specially those who are usign Visual Studio, shown to me by fellow author at our “world’s best football club” tribute blog.

The trick is simple, the first thing to do is configure our project folders in Launchy:

• Open Launchy window (Alt+Space) and with right-click on it to open Directories window
• Now in the Directories window we’ll configure the root directories where our Visual Studio solutions are stored and, for each folder, configure the file extension Launchy will recognize (.sln for Visual Studio Solutions)

Setting the project folders

• Now, to fasten things a bit, we’ll force Launchy to re-index the folders, including the added ones: right-click on the main window and click Rebuild Index.
• And that’s it! Now Visual Studio solutions can be opened just by writing its name in Launchy.

Launch a Visual Studio Solution by writing its name

Technorati Tags: launchy, keyboard launcher

Visual Studio 2005 has one interesting feature: if you write TODO in a code comment(or any other token defined in Options -> Environment -> Task List) that comment will appear in the Task List pane, making this perfect a perfect way to add notes to the source code and gather them all in one place to check later.

// TODO Assign variable this later
int a = 0;


But there’s just one problem, the comments in the Task List are just the ones that appear in the file currently opened in VS 2005, making a bit difficult to track them all in larger projects. A nice workaround is explicitly define a compile warning for these TODO’s, instead of using a comment, just like this:


#warning TODO Assign variable this later
int a = 0;


This way all the TODO’s in one project can be checked in one place

Technorati Tags: visual studio 2005

Is it just me or the source control in Team Foundation Server leaves some droppings behind? It seems the files and folders I remove from source control remain on the file system, or is this a just a problem with the Visual Studio 2005 integration? Maybe, as I hardly use Team Foundation Server from the command line, but either way is a bit annoying…

Technorati Tags: Microsoft, Visual Studio 2005, Team System, Team Foundation Server, Source Control