I came across a strange behavior of VS 2010 Ultimate and other version’s. I had VS 2008 Professional on my laptop and I tried installing VS 2010, it got installed each time but IDE crash was an issue. For instance, if I try to “Add a New Item” to the project IDE will crash and VS 2010 IDE will re-start.

I struggled with this for couple of days, and finally I thought of doing reverse installation. I.e, install VS 2010 and then VS 2008. So I Un-Installed Vs 2008 and VS 2010 (which was crashing) completely.

I did a fresh install of VS 2010, and then VS 2008, it works just fine.

VS 2010 IDE has a new feature where it “highlights” all other instances of a class member.

For example, in the image below I have Deposit function being called multiple times and when I select (by double-click) one instance of it, what this new feature of VS 2010 does is; it highlights (in gray color) all other instances of the selected member in the same file. Like shown in the image below.

Once you have multiple instsances of a member highlighted you can navigate through them by Ctrl+Shift+ Up arrow or Ctrl+Shift+Down arrow.

How many times you encountered a situation when you need to change the screen resolution or text size to make you code to appear in larger font. I encountered couple of time and instances especially when disusing something with team and people sitting far can’t see the code statements at all, in presentations etc.

The solution has been an easy approach, change resolution or change the font size from Tools –> Options. What appeared tedious to me was re-setting either one of these after the purpose is over.

VS 2010 Code Editor comes up with this new feature where you can just simply ZOOM your entire code editor view without changing resolution or text size.
To do so it’s a well known trick “Hold Left-click and scroll the Mouse Wheel.”

Click on the image to see larger view and use browser’s back button to re-visit this post.

How many times you encountered a situation when you need to change the screen resolution or text size to make you code to appear in larger font. I encountered couple of time and instances especially when disusing something with team and people sitting far can’t see the code statements at all, in presentations etc.

The solution has been an easy approach, change resolution or change the font size from Tools –> Options. What appeared tedious to me was re-setting either one of these after the purpose is over.

VS 2010 Code Editor comes up with this new feature where you can just simply ZOOM your entire code editor view without changing resolution or text size.
To do so it’s a well known trick “Hold Left-click and scroll the Mouse Wheel.”

Click on the image to see larger view and use browser’s back button to re-visit this post.

VS2010 IDE provides a new menu named Data and it has a brand new feature item “Transact-SQL Editor” this feature allows you to perform the db operations without leaving the VS development environment.
* Microsoft’s another step forward to make it a real IDE (Integrated Development Environment).

Read more about this feature on previous post: http://dotnetpassion.blogspot.com/2009/12/vs-2010-ide-integration-with-sql-2008-t.html

SQL 2008 is the main candidate which gets the privilege to provide db service to this new Data menu of VS2010, and so SQL 2008 express is part of VS2010 installation. Whereas this new Transact-SQL Editor is capable enough to connect to SQL 2005 instance as well. When it prompts for connection, by default it pulls SQL 2008 instance name (SQLExpress), you can choose “Browse for more” option and then expand the “Database Engine” node and select the SQL 2005 instance.

Now you are good to go and do your db work with SQL Server 2005 from VS 2010 IDE.

VS2010 IDE provides a new menu named Data and it has a brand new feature item “Transact-SQL Editor” this feature allows you to perform the db operations without leaving the VS development environment.
* Microsoft’s another step forward to make it a real IDE (Integrated Development Environment).

Read more about this feature on previous post: http://dotnetpassion.blogspot.com/2009/12/vs-2010-ide-integration-with-sql-2008-t.html

SQL 2008 is the main candidate which gets the privilege to provide db service to this new Data menu of VS2010, and so SQL 2008 express is part of VS2010 installation. Whereas this new Transact-SQL Editor is capable enough to connect to SQL 2005 instance as well. When it prompts for connection, by default it pulls SQL 2008 instance name (SQLExpress), you can choose “Browse for more” option and then expand the “Database Engine” node and select the SQL 2005 instance.

Now you are good to go and do your db work with SQL Server 2005 from VS 2010 IDE.

Microsoft will be providing an ability to upgrade exiting VS2008 environment into VS2010.

Whereas, it is also possible to have various VS (2005, 2008 and 2010) installtions to be available and run on the same machine.

For VS 2010 Beta users, Microsoft is also providing an upgrade path to be upgraded into VS 2010 final vesrion rather than doing a fresh and clean install.

World is changing and now most of the people has started working with two monitors, it makes them more productive, as people say.

Now if you consider, that you can view Form-Design and Form-code together, would it make you productive? or if you have ever felt sometimes how annoying it is to navigate from one tab to another tab in code editor view to look at code, compare, debug, or even work.

Considering this fact VS 2010 team made these Code/Form-Design windows Floatable, and so whichever code/design window you want to open in another monitor/screen parallely you can select “Float” option on the context menu (right-click that window) and drag it to your 2nd monitor.

If you see in the image here, as you right-click on a window it shows you a new option “Float”

click on the image to see larger view

Float was not an option with VS 2008 or earlier version of Visual Studios.Other options shown in the contect menu in the image above are same as of Visual Studio 2008 and earlier versions.

If you have noticed whenever you open a project in Visual Studio, it also opens “Start Page” in the project.

Whereas this is not what you always wanted, sometimes you want only code files pages shown in your project. Visual Studio 2010 team realized this and brought cutomization to user when you begin with a new project.

Click on the image to see larger view

If you select both the check-boxes (as shown in the image) you will see Start Page upon loading of VS 2010 IDE, but as soon as you create a project, Start Page will not be shown at all, unlike VS 2008 or earlier versions.

If you wish to see Start Page while working on a project you can use View menu, Start Page option.