Visual Studio Hacks [Electronic resources]

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.

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.

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].