Code like Mads

hello my name is Mads Kristensen and
I've been asked to show you how I use
Visual Studio so let's just jump right
in and take a look and let's start with
the tool windows that I have visible and
here at the bottom I have Error List and
I have the output window I always have
those two down there sometimes
additional windows will get down there
but I usually close them out for when
I'm done with them and over on the right
side I dock test Explorer solution
Explorer and team Explorer and they're
sitting over here always in this order
so that I can very easily get to the
things I need to do and I don't have too
much clutter so I like to keep things a
little bit night neat and clean and
here's an example of that so let's say
that I want to see the properties of a
file so I'm gonna hit f4 and my
properties window I actually open next
to my solution Explorer and I do that
because I don't usually that often and
when I do it's usually just to set a
single property or two and then close it
down again and so I don't want it to be
like permanent anywhere I like to have
it right here and then I just close it
out when I'm done with it and that's how
I do that so pretty nice and clean I'd
say I just have the standard toolbar up
here with one addition is that I've
added the manage extensions button right
here so I have easy access to my
extensions so let's take a look at the
options here so one thing that I have
done here is that I've removed some
check boxes so if you look at or
checkmarks rather so if we zoom in here
we can see that I don't want to reopen
documents and solution load and I don't
want to restore solution explorer
hierarchy state on solution load so
those are actually checked by default
and they have been for since forever
it's rather new that we have these two
check boxes
so that we can get rid of this default
behavior and let me just show you what
it is that these two settings help with
so let's just expand visual studio and
open some documents here and I'm gonna
close the solution so now now I want to
over the solution again and we're
probably used to opening a solution in a
visual studio automatically restore the
state that we were in the last time we
had the solution open so let's just do
that and we can see here that solution
Explorer does not keep the state
nothing is expanded everything's
collapsed and it did not open those
documents that were open before so
there's a couple of benefits to doing
this
one is that it's faster so the you know
time to solution open has reduced it so
I get a better performance out of it but
the main reason I do it is actually to
keep keep things a little simpler and to
reduce noise for myself so it's really
rare that I want to work on the same
file next time I open the solution and I
usually don't want to have the folders
open and you know multiple projects open
to the exact same state the next time I
work on the project which could be the
next day or the next month or even the
next year so for me that's just that's a
lot of sense to keep things clean this
way I use a lot of extensions too let's
take a look so I'm going to open the
extension manager and I got a whole
bunch here all sorts of things too much
stuff to go through some of them are
small some of them are bigger let me
give you an example of a small extension
I'm gonna zoom in here you know
sometimes you zoom in you're gonna show
your colleagues or whatever what's on
your screen you zoom into better so that
everyone can better see but now you want
to get back to a hundred percent and so
you can try to control and then mouse
wheel in and out until you hit a hundred
percent which can be hard to hit
sometimes so I have an extension that
just resets my zoom low
so control 0-0 puts everything back to a
hundred percent or whatever my default
is so I can set my default to be 100% or
to be hundred ten percent which is what
some people do not really a big thing
but it's just something I've come to
rely on and that's an example of a small
little feature another one that I use
actually quite frequently both when I do
web development asp.net and so on and
also when I write custom Visual Studio
extensions is the ability to optimize
and compress image files so they take up
as little space oh sorry a little weight
as possible
and so I have an extension called image
optimizer and that extensions allows me
to right-click any folder or a project
or solution what I'm doing here and I
can then optimize for best quality or
for best compression so best quality
means it will optimize a little bit so
you can't there's going to be no
difference in the quality of the images
they're going to look the same to the
human eye the next one here is for best
compression which compresses much much
harder so it makes the files a lot
smaller on disk not their dimensions
like width and height they stay the same
just on disk and there could be a
visible difference like you could see
the quality go down a little bit but
usually not and so this is actually the
one I always use I optimize for best
compression so if I click that some
processes kick in all run in the
background a bright background threats I
can see exactly what happened and I've
reduced the size of my images between
you know 3% and 11% so that's that's
quite a lot to do
just from a right-click and these are
images that I already optimized once
before but recently I updated the
algorithm to compress even better and so
I was able to squeeze more how do these
images so that's my setup I hope this
was interesting to some of you thanks
for watching