Month: February 2011

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Making F1 Do Something Useful in Visual Studio

Have you ever wished that hitting the F1 key in Visual Studio actually returned good search results in a quick manner? 

Personally I think the F1 key returns decent results, but there certainly are a lot out there who don’t.  I mostly work in .Net so I’m in the camp of users that F1 works well for.

The think I really don’t like though is the 30 seconds or so it takes to launch the help window.  Once you’re there navigation is pretty painful.

For the last several years I’ve all but abandoned F1 and just search Google with “msdn” and my search term.  95% of the time this returns exactly what I want in the first hit.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could make Visual Studio do this for us?  Well, we can, and have been able to for years!

Check out OriginalGriff’s solution on Code Project.  He clearly outlines the steps and I have to say his solution is quite nice and tidy.

However, I had two very minor criticism, purely for my own tastes.  This solution opens the webpage inside of Visual Studio’s web browser inside the IDE.  This works, but I really like using my own default browser (currently Chrome).  This allows me to open up various hits in several tabs and bookmark interesting solutions.  I can’t do that in the VS browser window.

Second is it grabs the selected text and performs the search on this.  If you don’t select anything it just opens up a search for “msdn”.  The original F1 functionality use to search whatever word your text cursor was on, nothing had to be selected.  I’m lazy and I like this ability.

Last, but not least, as I was writing this blog post and stated above that 95% of the time my search term came up in the first result it hit me. OMG If I think that what I want will be my first hit, why not just return Google’s first result; the equivalent of hitting the older I’m Feeling Lucky button on Google’s home page. If you look at Griff’s solution you will see below it that I proposed an alternate solution that adds these three features.  Now, when I hit F1 or Shift+F1 I, respectively, get the Google search or the first hit directly.

Enjoy!

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When Do You Blog?

I’m fairly busy with a load of tasks at work, but often I use a fun technology or enhance my learning when I can’t find a solution on Google and I think these would make good blog posts. The problem is finding the time to actually write them. Writing a blog post (at least for me) is often more than just typing for a few minutes. It involves code samples, occasional screen shots, previewing and making corrections and then finally posting. For a somewhat in-depth post this can take an hour or several. I have a running set of potential posts I would like to write but my list is getting longer and longer without much actually happening.

So, here’s my question. If you blog on a fairly regular basis (every week or a few times a month) and your posts are mostly instructional when do you do it? Do you have a few hours a week (like Friday after lunch) set aside to do this? Do you do it at 2am when the family is sleeping? Does your employer frown on you blogging on work time or do they actually promote it? For me, my employer doesn’t really know that I do it but they do occasionally see a post or two. I just discipline myself not to take too much work time to do it.

Do you have any tips that you have discovered that make the process a little smoother?

Do you have an assistant?   I’m serious on this one. A lot of my time is spent on correcting errors, re-wording sections and fiddling with format. If I was a professional blogger I’d probably do like movie composers do. I’d write the content, throw it together and then throw it over the wall. Let my assistant clean it up and rephrase complicated sections. Then I’d proof it and post it. I’m sure many professional bloggers have a similar set up. Any services that are somewhat reasonable that you use and would recommend? Maybe this is a market that is yet untapped. 

Thanks!