Tuesday, October 31, 2006

V2005 IDE Enhancements

Yesterday, Microsoft made Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 IDE Enhancements available for download on their website.

The Enhancements include
"Source Code Outliner : The Source Outliner tool is a Visual Studio extension that provides a tree view of your source code's types and members and lets you quickly navigate to them inside the editor.

Visual C++ Code Snippets: The Visual C++ Code Snippets tool lets you insert snippets in your code by using a pop-up menu that contains programming keywords. VB.NET and C# languages have this functionality in Visual Studio 2005.

Indexed Find: The Indexed Find tool is a Visual Studio extension that uses the Microsoft Indexing Service to provide improved Search capabilities to the integrated development environment (IDE). It sends the results of a search to the Output Window.

Super Diff Utility: The Super Diff Find tool is a Visual Studio extension that compares text files. It uses color coding and graphics to show the difference between the files in deleted text (red), changed text (blue), inserted text (green).

Event Toaster Utility: The Event Toaster tool is a Visual Studio extension that notifies users about specific events within the Visual Studio IDE."

Ready for IE7?

Is your website ready for Internet Explorer 7.0 ( IE7 )? If you aren't ready or your not sure, then please checkout the Checklist created by Microsoft to see if your website is compatible.

If your site isn't ready, then you should consider updating it soon because Microsoft is going to push out IE7 as a High Priority Automatic Update soon. This is rumored to happen sometime in November ( which is very close ).

You can install IE7 from Microsoft's main Internet Explorer Home. You might consider installing IE7 on a machine other than your development machine to test with first. Other than using virtual machines, I don't know of a good way to have both IE6 and IE7 side by side on your machine.

For those of you who like shortcuts, here is a Quick Reference Sheet for IE7.

Note: If you do install IE7 as your primary browser and you have difficulty with other websites, that haven't been as meticulous as you to make your site compatible, then you can install the User Agent String Utility version 2 developed by Microsoft.
"This utility changes certain registry keys on an IE 7.0 installation to allow a user to emulate an IE 6.0 installation as a simple workaround until problematic sites update their code. It also offers users the option to report these problematic sites to Microsoft."