Visual Studio Hacks [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Hack 25. Customize Menus and Toolbars

You can make Visual Studio work just the way
you want. After you create your own menu and toolbar items, you can
even move these settings between machines.

Visual Studio includes an impressive number of menus and toolbars. In
this hack, you will learn how you can customize them.

4.3.1. Customize Toolbars

The Visual
Studio toolbar can be customized in a number of ways, including ways
to add new toolbars and buttons, as well as modify and rearrange
current toolbars.

4.3.1.1 Modify existing toolbars

Before looking at creating new
custom toolbars, let's look at modifying the
existing toolbars. One of the easiest things to do is move buttons
around on an existing toolbar or move buttons from one toolbar
to another. This can be done by simply holding down the Alt key and
dragging and dropping a button from one toolbar to another or into a
different position on the current toolbar.

You can also add and remove buttons from existing toolbars using the
Customize screen, which can be accessed a couple of different ways.
The first way to access this screen is to go to Tools
Customize. You can also click on the small down arrow to the right of
every toolbar, select Add or Remove Buttons, and then select
Customize. Either approach brings you to the dialog shown in Figure 4-4.

Figure 4-4. Toolbars tab in Customize dialog

Once you are in this dialog, it puts the entire IDE in a special
customization mode. You can use the tabs here to customize any of the
existing toolbars. Clicking on a checkbox in the Toolbars list will
cause that toolbar to be displayed on the screen, which is the first
step if the toolbar you want to modify is not already shown. In this
example, let's add a Rebuild Solution button to the
Build Toolbar:

Click the checkbox to the left of the Build toolbar; this will show
the toolbar on the screen.

Click on the Commands tab in the Customize dialog. This tab is shown
in Figure 4-5.

On the Commands tab, select Build from the Categories list and then
drag the Rebuild Solution command from the Commands list to your
toolbar.

After performing these steps, you will have a toolbar that looks like
the one in Figure 4-6.

Figure 4-5. Customize dialogCommands tab

Figure 4-6. Build toolbar

Now that you have the Rebuild Solution command on the toolbar, it
would be nice to replace the text with a nice, easy-to-use
icon. To do this, right-click on the
item (make sure the Customize dialog is still open), and you will see
the menu shown in Figure 4-7.

Figure 4-7. Right-click menu for toolbar item

From this menu, you can rename your item and work with the image of
the item, as well as configure what is shown on the toolbar. Suppose
you want to base your button on the Build Solution button. To derive
a button from that one:

Right-click on the Build Solution icon (the second from the left in
Figure 4-6), and click Copy Button Image from the
menu. This will copy the image for that command to the clipboard.

Right-click on your Rebuild Solution item and click Paste Button
Image from the menu. This will add the icon from the normal Build
Solution item to the new item.

Next, you need to change your image a little bit so you can
differentiate between the two. This can be done using the Edit Button
Image command in the menu. Click on the Edit Button Image command,
and you will see a small image editor that you can use to modify the
image. In this example, simply replace the blue arrows of the image
with red arrows. This is a minor change, but should be enough to
remind you that this button is for rebuilding whereas the other
button is for building.

After changing the icon, you can change the display style to Default
Style; this will cause just the image to be shown on the menu.

The end
result is shown in Figure 4-8.

4.3.1.2 Adding new toolbars

Adding
a new toolbar is similar in many
ways to modifying an existing toolbar. Instead of starting with an
existing toolbar, you need to create your own. This is done from the
Customize screen found by going to Tools Customize. On
this screen, you need to click the New button. You will then be
prompted to name your new toolbar. After you name the toolbar, it
will be saved and will show up in the list of toolbars, and you can
edit it just as if it were a preexisting system toolbar.

4.3.2. Customize Menus

Customizing menus is very similar to customizing toolbars. Open the
Customize screen through Tools Customize. Once open,
instead of working on the Toolbars tab, you simply switch right to
the Commands tab and customize the menus from there. Once the
Customize dialog is open, you can customize menus much as if they
were toolbars. You simply need to click on the menu to open it, and
then you can drag a new command to the menu, rearrange items, or
right-click on an item to modify its image or text. Figure 4-9 shows an example of adding the Select Project
Template command to the File New menu.

Figure 4-9. Adding a command to a menu

4.3.3. Reset Changes

Sometimes

things
get botched up. Toolbars may disappear and won't
reappear. Buttons from a toolbar may not show up any more.
Thankfully, Visual Studio provides a method to reset all the toolbars
and menus. This can be done using the following procedure:

Close all running instances of Visual Studio.

Open the Visual Studio Command Prompt [Hack #77] .

Type devenv /setup.

This will reset all the toolbar and menu customizations and hopefully
fix whatever problems you are running into.

4.3.4. Hacking the Hack

Now that you

have made all these different
customizations to the menus and toolbars on the IDE, how can you save
these settings and move them to another computer? Unfortunately,
there is no power toy available to do this automatically, but
thankfully, it is not too hard. All of the changes are located in one
file in your user profile. All you need to do is copy this file to
the same directory on your new system. The file is called
CmdUI.PRF and is located in the
following directory:

\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\Microsoft\VisualStudio\<7.1>\1033

All you need to do is copy this file to your new system, and all of
your changes should be moved.