Visual Studio Hacks [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Hack 98. Combine the Visual Studio Command Prompt and the Command Window

The Command Prompt and Command Window are
addictive individually. Combine these two and you may never reach for
the mouse again.

The
VSCMDShell power toy can be used to
combine two of the more valuable parts of Visual Studio, the Visual
Studio Command Prompt [Hack #77]
and the Command Window [Hack #46] . Since these
tools are similar, someone at Microsoft had the great idea to write a
window that combines the functionality of both of these tools in one
place. Just having the Visual Studio Command Prompt inside the IDE is
valuablewhen you add the fact that you can execute Visual
Studio commands, it becomes invaluable.

The first step is to download and install the VSCMDShell power toy
from http://workspaces.gotdotnet.com/VSCMDShell.

Once you have downloaded and installed the power toy, you will find a
new menu item on the Tools menu called VSCMDShell Window that will
launch the window shown in Figure 13-19.

Figure 13-19. VSCMDShell Window

As you can see, the window looks just like the Visual Studio Command
Prompt, because it is. You can do anything you can do in the normal
Visual Studio Command Prompt in this window. You can run any of the
utilities discussed throughout this book or even just use it as a
normal command prompt.

You can also call any Visual Studio commands from this window by
simply prefacing the command with an exclamation point. Figure 13-20 shows how using an exclamation point shows the
command window IntelliSense.

Figure 13-20. Command window IntelliSense

For instance, you could enter the following command into the
VSCMDShell window:

>!File.OpenFile Class1.cs

This would call the OpenFile command and open
Class1.cs in the development environment. For a
list of helpful command window commands, please refer to
[Hack #46].