First thing I do is disable 'Automatically adjust visual experience based on client performance' and 'Enable rich client visual experience', but keep 'Use hardware graphics acceleration if available' enabled. Speed is everything baby!
Then I customize the toolbar and add BC. Pro-tip; remove all toolbar button's you never use.
I always install the following plugins:
- Resharper
- File Nesting
- Rename Visual Studio Window Title
- Scrum Power Tools for Visual Studio 2013
- (optional) SlowCheetah - XML Transforms
Setup the Rename Visual Studio Window Title plugin (to see which branch I'm working in):
Setup Scrum Power Tools (I use this for code reviews and workitem shortcuts in the toolbar):
- Assign the work item and backlog items to Shortcut #1 and Shortcut #2
- Customize the toolbar and add the button for Shortcut #1 and Shortcut #2 to the standard toolbar
This is what my final toolbar looks like:
I also use fiddler for API debugging. For API's its really important to see the HTTP method. To add this column, enable / add the following block in the Rules > Customize rules file:
public static BindUIColumn("Method", 60)
function FillMethodColumn(oS: Session): String {
return oS.RequestMethod;
}
When you also retrieve large binary blocks, fiddler can really slow down when you accidentically click on one. The very powerfull Customize rules file, also has a solution for this. Add the following code inside the OnPeekAtResponseHeadersfunction. This will drop large response bodies, which slows down fiddler.
// This block enables streaming for files larger than 5mb
if (oSession.oResponse.headers.Exists("Content-Length"))
{
var sLen = oSession.oResponse["Content-Length"];
var iLen: Int32 = 0;
if (!isNaN(sLen)){
iLen = parseInt(sLen);
if (iLen > 5120000) {
oSession.bBufferResponse = false;
oSession["ui-color"] = "brown";
oSession["log-drop-response-body"] = "save memory";
}
}
}
