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Simple Resx Editor - A good alternative to using Visual Studio for Resx / Resource Files

Filed under C# , General , Visual Studio , work

I've noticed that some members of my team were having difficulties with Visual Studio when using resource files. Any time they would open a file it would crash Visual Studio. As you can imagine this was very frustrating for all involved.

After a quick search I found a pretty neat alterative editor called 'Simple Resx Editor' by Matías. Currently this resource editor is at version 0.6.2 but it is being worked on at the time to improve the functions available.

The main benefit I like about this editor is that you can open all your resource files, side by side and edit them all in one quick go. This is a perfect setup when dealing with multiple languages as it really speeds things up. If you just want to work on one resource file and you need to know what the Key Name values are simply click on the big Key icon on the top of the app. This little app is small, quick to use and really offers a benefit over the built in editor in Visual Studio in my opinion.

The only snag I noticed while working with the editor is that if you had a very long Value field there are no scrollbars showing. I've left a message to Matías about this issue and I'm sure this will be fixed in the next version of this software.

How to 'Find All' in Visual Studio

Filed under General , Visual Studio

Before I moved over to Visual Studio I used to code in Dreamweaver. One feature within Dreamweaver that I always found handy was the Find All option for finding all occurrences of the search criteria I had entered.

I always thought that this was a feature missing in Visual Studio as there was no option on the 'Quick Find' (ctrl + F) to find all. The only option on the quick find is to 'find and replace all' which usually isn't what I want to do.

The good news is that Visual Studio has a Find All built into it. To find the option (excuse the pun!) all you need to do is hold Ctrl and Shift and press F or click on Edit -> Find and Replace -> Find In Files. This will open up a dialog box that will let you enter your search criteria. Simply hit the Find All button and you will see a list of results returned to you that match your criteria. You can then double click on any of the search results to go directly to that line of code.

It's a small thing but it's handy to know where to go to use that option. Hopefully it will help someone else out.

How to stop Visual Studio renaming ID values when pasting content

Filed under General , Visual Studio

I actually really like how Visual Studio renames my ID values when pasting content to ensure that all ID values are unique - as they should be. However, the designers on my team always give me a hard time over this as they say it slows them down and that they would prefer if the system would let them decide when to rename ID values. I can see their point if they are copying and pasting code from other project that this 'feature' would soon become very annoying.

So to turn off this feature all you need to do is follow the steps below:

Step1: Go to the menu bar and click on 'Tools' and then 'Options'.

Step 2: On the popup screen than appears there is a little checkbox in the lower left corner that says 'Show All Settings'. Make sure that is selected.

Step 3: Expand the 'TextEditor' option and expand the 'HTML' option.

Step 4: Click on 'Miscellaneous' and untick the option 'Auto ID elements on paste in Source view'.

Step 5: Click OK and now when you paste any html content or code with the same ID values as what is in your project Visual Studio will not rename the IDs.

Solgar.ie goes live with Dragnet Systems New Online Store Software

Filed under C# , Visual Studio , web technologies , work , Online Stores

Dragnet Systems Limited is proud to launch its new flagship online store software. Our software has a number of benefits to businesses:

• No nonsense, simple to use interfaces for your customers and your site admin team.
• Excellent reporting tools showing you what products were sold in any timeframe you choose, view all sales for the last 30 days, view all sales for the last year, etc.
• Reminder emails automatically sent to customers. Useful technique to get your customers to return to your site.
• Promotions tools giving you the flexibility to offer your customers discounts.
• Auto image resizing for product images uploaded. you don't need to worry about resizing your images, our software will manage it all.
• SEO friendly page links. Site fully optimized for Google, MSN, Yahoo, etc.
• Email Marketing. Your customers can easily sign up, and opt out of email marketing on the site. You have total control over the email's sent to your customers. Includes filters to effectively targeting the right people.
• Site optimized for speed. Sites load insanely fast and fully tested with over 100,000 products and orders in the system - it's fully robust!
• And much much more!

If you think you might be interested in taking our store software for a spin simply contact Dragnet Systems today and see how this software could help your online business succeed.

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This ends my shameless plug ;) Sorry about that, I'm just very excited about this new product!

www.localhost.com is displayed when trying to debug in Visual Studio

Filed under Visual Studio

I posted about this issue in the previous version of my blog but I came up against it recently on my new home PC so I thought I'd blog about it again, if only so I can check this out the next time it happens to me.

Problem: Visual Studio 2008 incorrectly defaults to showing the url www.localhost.com when opening a browser for debugging which stops your page from loading.

Solution: You can type in your local home IP address - 127.0.0.1 - in place of www.localhost.com Visual Studio put in the browser URL but this means that you have to wait for ages for the browser to stop searching for www.localhost.com before it will let you type this in. What you should do is locate the following file:

C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts

Open it in Notepade and remove the line that says

::1             localhost

If you can't overwrite the existing file because of Vista's UAC then save to your desktop as a txt. Once saved, knock off the .txt part of the filename you just saved and then copy and paste the file into the Windows\System32\drivers\etc. Click Yes to overwrite the existing file. Your debugged site will now show up with the correct address. Easy when you know how....I won't say how long I was looking for that solution!