In a large Visual Studio solution with lots of projects, it's sometimes useful to turn on "track active item in solution explorer". (this causes the current file to be found and selected in solution explorer as you view different files).

This can sometimes be disconcerting, because it expands various project trees accordingly to show you the current file. I wanted to turn this OFF today, but I was then thinking of the holy grail where I *occassionally* want to find where a given file is in the solution explorer.

Enter Gaston Milano's Cool Commands.
(found via google)

In addition to "track current item on demand", some highlights of other things that Cool Commands does:

• open containing folder for a file in solution explorer
• "copy reference" over to another project in a solution
  
• add projects from folder

Gaston Milano's WebLog : CoolCommands 3.0 for Visual Studio 2005

(some more highlights of what it does here)

Thanks a ton Gaston!!

Thanks to Brian (actually first Google) for this info. It's probably well known and all over the web ... but I just stumbled upon it today.

In previous versions of the IDE and other XML files, you can describe the XSD for a given xml file in the standard way, with xmlns attribute in the root element. The VS IDE will then look in Visual Studio 8\Xml\Schemas\ directory and provide intellisense when editing the XML.

Turns out, the .NET configuration file XSD is now automatically merged with the schemas known to the VS IDE. So having the xmlns attribute on a configuration file element just confuses the IDE (and Intellisense won't work)

Thanks to Brian - first hit on Google search for this info!

.NET Ramblings - Brian Noyes' Blog - WCF Config file intellisense... why hath thou forsake me?

Someday when another project requires extensive logging like the one I'm rolling off soon, I'll have to give NLog a look. Compare it to Enterprise Library logging application block.

At a super quick glance, they're similar. NLog supports async logging out of the box (sounds like it's just a background thread, so messages could be lost if process shutsdown quickly?), and apparently very efficient filtering (throwing away messages that don't meet specific criteria, not worthy of being "logged" to their destination).

NLog - Introduction

I was talking to my co-worker Adam today about WPF. Someday when I have spare time (ya right), I would like to start learning some WPF.

Chris Sells has a blog entry about some WinFX technology samples that show integrated code from all 3 techs (WPF, WF, WCF) working together.

Marquee de Sells: Chris's insight outlet