As we develop applications in a particular IDE, it becomes imperative that we come to terms with the technical details of the IDE itself. Features like shortcuts can prove big time saves when working in huge projects. In this post, I want to discover the command window feature in Visual Studio 2005 and 2008.
Command window allows working with the IDE using commands, instead of using the mouse and the IDE menu. Some times it is just quicker to pop open the command window and perform routine tasks, such as opening and saving files, creating aliases for other windows, reading and setting the value of a variable during debugging.
Once in a while my IDE would get messed up and I would lose my solution explorer. By having an alias for it, I simply open up the command window and get straight to any window that I need. Now, solution explorer does have its shortcut (Ctrl-Alt-L), but I am not very keen about these "3keyed shortcuts". For those of us that are used to the more traditional Dos Prompt Style, command window makes us feel right at home with its command features.
Command window can be accessed using the shortcut Ctrl-Alt-A.
Lets get down and dirty and see some useful features that have helped me. I am sure you would find them useful as well.
Creating Aliases
Aliases allow us to define a shorter name for a command. So, for example, we can define an alias to open up Server Explorer using the alias syntax like this:
alias se View.ServerExplorer
Now, lets have a look at our created alias. Simply type alias and press Enter to see a list of all aliases defined in the environment.
The alias command gives us a list as show in the image above. Notice our newly created alias highlighted.
To run this alias, simply type se on an empty line in the command window and the Server Explorer opens up for us.
To delete an alias, type in: alias se /delete as shown below.
Command window has other useful uses as well. I will leave those for another post.
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