Technorati tags: .net, freetools
While gathering information about Visual Studio add-ins for a potential local user group presentation, I came across Gaston Milano’s “CoolCommands”.
As far as I can tell, the latest version of the CoolCommands installer can be downloaded here:
http://download.deklarit.com/files/gmilano/coolcommands40.zip.
It adds a lot of useful tools to Visual Studio, but there’s no help or “read-me” file documenting them, and I couldn’t find a consolidated overview on Gaston’s site, so here’s my attempt to summarize the CoolCommands tools:
Collapse All Projects
Context menu item displayed when a solution name is right-clicked in the Solution Explorer – Simulates clicking the close (minus sign) icon for all expanded projects.
Open Container Folder
Context menu item displayed when a project or file name is right-clicked in the Solution Explorer – Displays the project folder in Windows Explorer (and automatically selects the right-clicked file if you launched the menu from a file name rather than the project name).
Visual Studio Prompt Here
Context menu item displayed when a project name is right-clicked in the Solution Explorer – Opens the Visual Studio Command Prompt window, initialized to point to the project’s folder.
Demo Font
Context menu item displayed in response to a right-click in a text editor window – Quickly toggles between an 18-point font size and your preferred (Tools | Options | Environment | Fonts & Colors) font size.
Wheel Font Sizing
Context menu item displayed in response to a right-click in a text editor window – I don’t have a wheel mouse on this PC, but it looks like this toggles the ability to change the text editor font size via the mouse wheel.
Send By Mail
Context menu item displayed in response to a right-click in a text editor window – Launches your email program’s “new message” window with the selected code pasted into the body.
Open File
Context menu item displayed in response to a right-click in a text editor window – If you right-click on a string literal containing a file name, this option opens the file.
Copy File
Context menu item displayed in response to a right-click in the tab at the top of a text editor window (seems to me it should be in the Solution Explorer instead or at least also) – Displays a popup window asking where you want to save a copy of the selected file:
Locate in Solution Explorer
Context menu item displayed in response to a right-click in the tab at the top of a text editor window – Highlights the file in the Solution Explorer (expands solution, project & folders if necessary and even shows the Solution Explorer window if it’s not visible).
Copy Reference
Context menu item displayed in response to a right-click on a reference displayed in a project’s References list in Solution Explorer – Used in conjunction with…
Paste Reference
Context menu item displayed in response to a right-click on or in project’s References “folder” in Solution Explorer – Adds a reference copied from another project via the “Copy Reference” tool to the current project’s References list.
Resolve Project References
If you open a project and it has broken “project” references because you usually open the project as part of a solution, this context menu item displayed in response to a right-click on a project name in Solution Explorer automatically adds the referenced projects to the current solution.
Reference Manager
Opened via a context menu item displayed in response to a right-click on a solution or project name in Solution Explorer.
If you enter part of an assembly name in the “Find Reference” box and press the Enter key, the Reference Manager will show you which projects contain a reference to that assembly.
You can use the “Remove” button to quickly remove a reference from multiple projects.
If you click the “Add Reference” button, you’ll see the standard Visual Studio “Add Reference” dialog, but you can use the Reference Manager to quickly add references to multiple projects at once.
Add As String Resource
Context menu item displayed in response to a right-click in a text editor window – Pops up a dialog to allow you to easily specify a key and value (defaults to the selected text), and a dropdown list of resource files to which you can add the new string resource.
There’s some great stuff here (especially the reference tools), but it would be nice if CoolCommands were packaged a little better:
- Version 3 had an .msi installer, but you have to run a .bat file to install version 4, and I’m not sure how to uninstall it.
- Some documentation – even a readme.txt or a web page with a summary – would help a lot.
- It would be really great if there were a configuration screen where you could select which tools should be visible – My right-click menus are almost long enough to require scrolling now.
If you have any questions or complaints about CoolCommands, please address them to Gaston, not to me.
