Double Click to Open Visual Studio Solutions in Vista/2008

For a while I have been running Visual Studio under Vista (x32) and now I’m using Workstation 2008 (very happily too!).   I have UAC on, but have a policy setting to automatically elevate without showing a prompt.  (I absolutely can’t live with the dialogs…see here and here for more info).

I have also Visual Studio set to run as administrator, and that’s where the problem starts: I have not been able to open solution files by double clicking them. 

I am very grateful to “Sajeev Prasad / Arun Arcot” response to this post for the solution.

Basically, set both IDE and the loader (%programfiles%\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\MSEnv\VSLauncher.exe) to run as administrator and you can then double click to open solutions.

Thanks Sajeev and Arun!

ReSharper Plugins

I’ve been using ReSharper since it’s first EAP release (late 2003 or early 2004, if I am right) and quite simply would not want to code without it.

ReSharper is a platform that can be easily extended and it is worth noting that there are a number of excellent plugins available that to make your ReSharper experience even better.

I mentioned Scout in an earlier post, but there are plugins for NHibernate, Gallio, xUnit and also for stuff like helping extract resources for internationalisation.

Check here for more details.

XML Editor - Liquid XML Studio

I’ve just started using a great XML editor: Liquid XML Studio.  I used it when creating some XSDs the other day.  It’s really easy to use, and has a great graphical interface too. 

The thing I really really like is the feature to generate an instance of the schema.  The only other tool I’m aware of that does this is the BizTalk schema editor – but that’s a bit more of a heavyweight tool than I usually need!

It also has Visual Studio integration (with the visual editor), XPath expression builder, documentation generation and a web service browser.  It’s not cheap, but there is a free feature limited Community Edition.  There’s also the high end Developer Edition that adds a load of muscle for people working with more complex schemas, such as the OASIS schemas.

Joyful Reflections - ReSharper Scout

I’ve just found an excellent ReSharper plugin called Scout.  This lovely little beast will open Reflector when you choose Go to Declaration.  The thing I really love is that Scout also takes care of loading the appropriate assembly in Reflector.  I previously had to load the assembly in Reflector before I could browse it, which took time.  Scout makes this process seamless.

All you have to do is right click and select Go to Declaration:

Then you get taken to the item in Reflector and the correct assembly is loaded:

Scout will also take you to the Dotnet source code – but I haven’t got around to that yet!  You can find lots of other ReSharper plugin goodness here.