Visual Studio Hacks [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Hack 78. Launch Visual Studio from the Command Prompt

If you want to exercise obsessive control about
how Visual Studio is launched, you'll be pleased to
know that you can do it all from your friendly neighborhood command
prompt.

The Visual Studio IDE executable is called
devenv.exe and
includes a number of command-line switches that can be very useful.
Elsewhere in this book, we have looked at a couple of these switches,
but in this hack, you will learn about all the switches and how they
can be used.

Typing command-line switches every time you launch an application is time consuming and just plain inefficient. Remember that you can create shortcuts that call an executable using command-line switches; you could have a number of different shortcuts for Visual Studio with different command-line switches.

10.3.1. Setting Fonts

One of
the simplest, but very useful, things you can accomplish using
command-line switches is setting the font and font size for the IDE.
To specify the font, you can use the
/fn switch, and to specify the
size, you use /fs. It is important to note that
this is not the font size of the text or contents of your files, but
rather the text size of the IDE. You won't see it
affect the normal menus, but the font and size of the document tabs,
options dialog, and so forth will all be in the specified font type
and size.

The following command line could be used to set the Visual Studio IDE
font to Verdana and the size to 14:

C:\> devenv /fn Verdana /fs 14

This does not need to be set each and every time you run the IDE;
these settings will be saved and used from here on out. This is the
same setting you can configure under Tools Options
Fonts and Colors, then selecting the Dialogs and Tool
Windows option from the Show Settings drop-down.

10.3.2. Execute a Command

Using

the command switch, you can launch
Visual Studio and automatically call a Visual Studio command. All you
need to do is specify the switch /command and then
follow it with the name of the command that you want to execute.
These are the same commands covered in [Hack #46]. In this example, I
will call the File.OpenSolution commandI almost always open
Visual Studio with the intent of opening a solution, so this saves a
couple of mouse clicks:

C:\> devenv /command File.OpenSolution

When you run this command, Visual Studio will open, and the New
Solution dialog will open. You could also use
/command to execute a macro you have written to
perform more complex actions.

10.3.3. Run a Solution

You
can automatically run a solution
from the command line using the /run switch. The
following is an example of running a solution from the command line:

C:\> devenv /run HacksWinSample.sln

When this command is run, the IDE will open and automatically jump
into debug mode loading your application. You can also use the
/runexit switch, which will launch your
applications and minimize the IDE. When you close your application,
the IDE will be closed as well.

10.3.4. Building Projects and Solutions

You can build your

projects or solutions using
command-line switches. This can be a great alternative if you
don't have time to configure a build tool like NAnt,
but want to create a build process using a batch file. To build a
solution, you use the
/build

switch as well as the
/project or /solution switch.
Here is an example of building a solution from the command line:

C:\> devenv HacksWinSample.sln /build release

After the /build
switch, you specify the solution configuration that you want to use
when building this solutionin this example, I have used the
release configuration. Running this will build the solution without
opening the IDE, and the build results will be returned to the
command prompt window. A number of other build switches are detailed
in Table 10-1.

10.3.5. Other Switches

A number of other command-line switches
can be used to do various things with Visual Studio. These
command-line switches are shown in Table 10-2.