My Development Setup

Last week my PC got upgraded. This blogpost serves as a reference for all the stuff I do to personalize Visual Studio and Fiddler.

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.

• Add Source control button
• Add Beyond Compare

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):

1. Assign the work item and backlog items to Shortcut #1 and Shortcut #2
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";
    }
  }
}