5 Ways to Personalize Visual Studio

>> On today's Visual Studio Toolbox, Leslie shows us five cool ways to personalize Visual Studio. [MUSIC] >> Hi, welcome to Visual Studio Toolbox. I'm your host Robert Green. Joining me today is the regular host of the show, Leslie Richardson. Hi, Leslie. >> Hi. I'm so excited to be on the show. Wow. >> I'm just so excited to have you on the show as a guest. >> Wow, I don't think I've ever been on the show before. This is exciting. >> Rather than just have you do the hosting and the guesting and asking yourself questions, we're going to be on the show together. That's awesome. You're going to show us five ways to personalize Visual Studio. >> Yeah, I've got some hot tips just based off of things that I use regularly in Visual Studio and also things that I recently discovered that I thought were really cool and were worth showing off. >> I think it's really easy to just accept the Visual Studio defaults and never really noticed them, but there's so many things you can do to personalize it. I'm excited to see these. >> Yeah and these are super random. My only thing is we're actually not talking about themes today because I thought that would be too obvious. But if you haven't used Visual Studio themes, definitely check it out because there's a lot of options on the marketplace. But, yeah, so shall we dive on in? >> Let's do it. >> Awesome. I'm going to share my screen. Tip number 1, solution colors. This is an extension actually that good old Matts Kristensen made pretty recently. It's actually part of a larger experiment to see if this may someday get incorporated into Visual Studio as an integrated feature. But I think it's really nice especially if you have multiple monitors or multiple instances of Visual Studio specifically that you're hopping between that each contain different solutions. If you're like me, there have been times where it's 2:00 AM. Like I remember I was creating a demo for Ignite last year and I was going through between two similarly name solutions. I edited one having not realized that I edited the wrong one. I'm trying to debug my code wondering why I haven't my changes appeared in the right solution. It turns out, oh, I just wasn't paying attention to the correct instance. As a way to help you out with that, solution colors can come into play. This is very similar to colored tabs if you use those. You can right-click on a solution and then set solution color and choose a color of your choice. I'm going to go with gold. I also have another instance open to show it off. For this other solution that I've got, right-click and set solution color. Pick a color. >> Let's go mint. >> All right, mint. What I like is a bonuses when you hover over and Window code bar you get. I'd say you get little quick indicators that don't involve having to read at 2:00 AM telling you what goes with what and swapping between them. It's just another easy identifier when you're hopping between multiple instances of Visual Studio toolbox. >> It primarily shows in that line at the bottom. Well, that's awesome. >> It's pretty sleek. I had just discovered this. Thank you, Matts. >> What I do a lot is I rewrite a lot of my demo app. I have a XAML forms app and I'm going to rewrite it in Maui. All of the names are the same because the code just copies and pastes over and then I'm constantly confused which one it is. They're both open in Visual Studio. They're both named the same. >> Yeah. >> That'll be cool. >> Life saver. We are going to try that out. It is an extension. It's called Solution Colors, I believe. I think I have it up here somewhere. >> Solution Colors. >> Oh, yes. Yeah. That only wants. >> Cool. >> Thank you, Matts. Cool. Tip number 2, I'm cheating a bit because it's multiple tips in one, but there's so many ways to customize tabs now. It's ridiculous. I already mentioned colored tabs. If you want to do that or actually let's use this example, Cod Apps. You can go into Tools Options, and you have a whole section for tabs in Windows and a lot of different ways to customize from here. If you check the colorized document tabs by option and then you can choose how you want your tabs to be colored either by Project or File extension. I'm going to stick with Project. In this example, I have like 20-some projects within the solutions. As you can see, I've got multiple colors. Just a really nice indicator again, especially if you're like me and you've named all of your files the same thing, it can be a nice way to be able to quickly identify what goes with. >> I use that a lot. I have the XAML, the.XAML file one color and the. XAML.CS file at different color. Because I have them all in the tab. The XAML files are all on top, the.CSes are on the bottom because, they all have the same first name, so I use that a lot to separate those. >> Awesome. That's exactly what it's for. Shout out to Grace and her team. Grace is on the show. Pretty recently, they put in colored tabs a couple updates ago, maybe over a year ago. Time flies. Really cool. Also what's really cool are the different ways that you can lay out your tabs. We've got horizontal tabs by default but you can also organize them by vertical. If I wanted to place the tabs on the left, and I could do that. Also if you have colored tabs enabled, it's great because it splits them all up for you too. >> That's cool. >> But I prefer to keep things horizontal so I'm going to set mine back to horizontal. What's even better than the horizontal layout now is that in the most recent Visual Studio update, I think so 173, I want to say, you can have your tabs in multiple rows. How sweet is that? You don't have to have your hidden tabs hidden away. If you want to see everything all at once, then you can do that. >> Cool. >> The possibilities are endless. I'm going to swap back to what I had before. Tip number 3, also related to the tabs. But if you've ever had the issue of having multiple tabs open and you're choosing the default tab layout, it can sometimes be difficult to tell which of these open tabs is currently being displayed on screen right now. Now there is a new feature that was also introduced in a recent update >> What does it call? Showing names not visible in italics. You'll notice that are in italicize and these are the tabs that are currently off screens if I wanted to open that and it can do that. I love this. If you want to enable it because it's not set by default, you can go and see Tools Options back in the tabs in Windows section and it is here somewhere. We show on visible tabs in italic and tab drop-down menu. When you want to. >> Cool. >> Sweet. Tip number 4, we have got rainbow braces. Sometimes when you're going through your code, it can be a little frustrating trying to quickly identify which bracket lines up with which bracket or which brace lines up with which brace. Sometimes especially if you have maybe a nested situation going on. >> Isn't that what the dashed lines are for though? >> That is what the dashed lines are forward to some degree. But let's say you have the braces, like the parentheses that don't do that. Sometimes you might have like a nested function call or something like that, something that makes it a little harder to tell what brace goes with which unless you move your cursor directly in that section. If you just want to quickly skim through and make sure you're on the right track, there is another extension that you can check out called rainbow braces, which was also created by Matts. Thank you Matts. There's an equivalent extension that's been in the marketplace for a while that does a similar thing called Diaspora, if that's how you pronounce it. But I can just use my keyboard shortcut "Shift Control 9." You'll notice that all my braces and parentheses have been colored for me. It's like a quick identifier to know what's going on with white without having to constantly move my cursor to the place in order to get it highlighted by default. >> Cool. >> I like this one a lot in those times where you might forget a brace and yes, you get the error message. But sometimes it's just nice to be able to cleanly tell. >> Yet actually gives you a nice set of glance, gives you more information than the dashed lines. I like that. >> Totally. Last but not least, the fifth tip that I've got for you is custom window layouts. I just found out about this like a couple days ago, didn't even know it existed, but I think it's been around for awhile. That's usually how a lot of Visual Studio features go when it comes to discoveries sometimes. But this lets you save your layout of your IDE and then load it back up when you feel like it. To use it we are going to go into window and save window layout. I'm going to keep what I have here and let's call this one The Norm. While this doesn't work for everything, it works great for when you want to customize which windows are currently docked or where they're positioned. If you don't want certain windows displayed, that thing. Let's say I don't want the Package Manager console I'm going to close this out. I'm going to move the Solution Explorer to the left-hand side, which I feel like I should have anyway. I'm left-handed and I find it a lot more intuitive to keep the Solution Explorer to the left-hand side of the screen. Then we're going to go into window and I'm going to say this window layout and I'm going to call it The New Norm. We're very inspired of names here on individual video team. Then from there you can go load up your saved windows. We go into apply window layout which you also have keyboard shortcuts. I'm currently on The New Norm and go back to The Norm and there it is. >> Does that save your open documents as well? >> From what I understand, it does not apply to your Windows documents that are currently opened and stuff like that. >> That could be enlighten her enhancement because then if you were done for the day and you are shutting down into little studio which you wanted to open up next time, literally where you were with all the files open, actually even scroll down to the same place. >> Yeah. >> That might be interesting. >> It's pretty nice. And you can also choose to have one view where the window is split, looking at multiple paths at the same time, you do that. >> I think a lot of people have their home multi monitor view and then their laptop on the road view or different views for different project types. >> Yeah, I think really cool because honestly this is something that I wanted to see NBS for a while. Like I think this version could stone use them work and I'll probably be going over to the deaf community and putting in my own feature suggestions as to how and this idea. But, just having the ability to provide custom experiences that you can toggle between. It's very similar to I use Photoshop a lot, so they have like by default, custom workspaces. Like here's the photography workspace or the graphic design workspace, and then depending on which one you click, it gives you a related tools and stuff Brenton Center, and hides away the ones that you may not necessarily need for that particular topics. Would love to see this feature utilized a lot more in the future. >> Yeah so let's review. We did five ways, what were they? >> Yes, so we had solution colors. Great. Government wants to instances of VS and you need to differentiate between them, especially if there are multiple solutions. We talked a lot about tabs, so we've got Vertical Tabs, colored tabs, being able to Show Tabs and multiple rows. Number 3, we had been able to show your hidden tabs or italics. We also have number 4, which is Rainbow braces, the ability to quickly identify what Brazor, which parentheses going with what, and you can use. This one requires an extension, much like solution colors, it's called rainbow braces on the Visual Studio Marketplace. Definitely check it out, and number 5, we talked about custom window layouts. >> Awesome, very cool. >> Yeah, I think it's pretty cool. You discover something every day even though you work on the product everyday. >> Yeah. Obviously, we'll have been in the product for a longer summer brand new extension, so there's so much going on. >> Yeah. >> That is cool. Well, thanks for coming on the show and thanks for letting me host the show to have you come on. >> Thanks for having me maybe I can come back sometime. >> Maybe. >> I will >> We will work on a five more ways to personalize Visual Studio episode. >> Awesome. >> Awesome. I hope you guys enjoyed that, we will see you next time on Visual Studio Toolbox. [MUSIC]