Chapter 6: Pumping Up the IDE

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“I am Hans and he is Franz. And we want to pump you up!”

—Dana Carvey as Hans, Saturday Night Live

Overview

It may not be a 98-pound weakling, but Visual Studio .NET (VS .NET) can still use a bit of help in reaching its full potential. VS .NET is a fine integrated development environment (IDE), but even Microsoft doesn’t have the resources to make it perfect for every developer. In fact, it’s impossible to make an IDE that’s perfect for every developer, because different developers have different habits. Fortunately, there are a variety of ways in which you can make the IDE more useful for your own needs and working habits. These range from taking advantage of the options already present in the product, to writing macros to automate repetitive tasks, to installing third-party tools and add-ins that bring new functionality to the IDE.

In this chapter, rather than focus on the code of Download Tracker (which is still moving along), I’m going to turn my attention to the development environment. You’ll see some more code, but the goal of this chapter is to demonstrate some of the ways that the IDE can help you write your own code.

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