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";
    }
  }
}

How to add a big fat TFS "Source Control" button in your toolbar

As developer we spend a lot of time in Source Control. In VS2010 there isn't a default big Source Control button in the toolbar, and because I always forget how to add it back after a reset settings, here's how I do it: First click on the little arrow-down next to the toolbar you want the Source Control button in, then Add or Remove buttons followed by Customize.

Click on Add command and look for View in the left column and TfsSourceContolExplorer in the right column (be patient, clicking on view takes a couple of seconds). And click OK.

Click on Modify selection to Rename the button, begin a new group and make sure the Image and Text is selected!

Bazinga! The 'never have to look for source control'-button is there to be clicked!