Subtitles of the Movie

Let's take a look at Managing the Screen Real Estate in Visual Studio. Now what you're seeing right now in the Course is I'm using a resolution of 1024 by 768 which is really small for development, but it's what we're limited to, to record videos, so that we can make sure that you see them in a resolution number one that fits your screen and that you can yet still see what's going on. But this is really cool about Visual Studio because if you have a 1024 by 768 monitor you can still develop relatively easy because they've done some really, really neat things about managing the real estate on the screen. First up I'm going to continue using the basic Windows Application that I created a little earlier, so if you don't have this up and you want to play along here, just open up Visual Studio, do File, New Project, and choose a Windows Form Application and take all the defaults and just click OK, and you'll get something like this. Then come over here and just drag a Button on and let it go. Now, if you double-click on that Button you're going to notice that you've got to write, you've got to type in here, but it's running off the right side, okay, and so it gets kind of irritating to scroll back and forth. But there are a couple of things you can do here, OK, obviously we could close the Toolbox and close the Solutions Floor and Properties Window and we'd have a lot more room. But I want you to notice these Push Pins, and notice this is the Auto Hide Push Pin, and if I click this notice what happened. That slid out of the way and if I mouse back over it, it will come back out and I can get to it, okay. If I go to my Design Window where my Form is and mouse over the Toolbox you'll notice there are all of my tools that I can use. OK, there's all of my various controls that I can drop onto the Form. Now, on the right side over here, well first of all let's notice what that did to our Form area; we've got a lot more Ð or Edit Window Ð we've got a lot more room, but notice the Solution Explorer has one of these, and if I click it so that it will expand and collapse the Properties Window, I can click it as well. Now notice these become tabs on the right side. If you'll look just to the right of my mouse here you'll notice here's the Properties Window and if I slide my mouse over it, it comes out and then I can work, and if I move over to the Solution Explorer it will pop out and work. But when I'm not on top of those notice I now have a lot more room to work with here. If I ever want these things to stick out there again, all I have to do is mouse over them, come up here, click on that little Push Pin, make it vertical, and notice that it stuck. Now I can also resize these things if I would like to give myself more room. Now there is one other trick and some people like to see the Properties out here as they code, OK, so if I click on a Button I want to see all the Properties on that Button, right? And if I click on this Button, notice it's going to change to Button3, so there are all the Properties for Button3. But now, what if I go to the Code Window and I want this thing to go away and I want this thing to go away. I can hold down the Alt key, the A-L-T, Alt key, hold down Shift, and press Enter and it goes full screen. It puts the Coding Window full screen for me, and Alt-Shift-Enter will take it back where it was. OK? I can get it off of the, I think it's the View Menu up here, to go full screen and you'll notice it's telling me here. A lot of people don't notice this and then I can even click on Full Screen to take it back to where it was. But what a lot of developers like, since you're in here typing code, is to just without having to mov your hands off the keyboard back to the mouse just Alt-Shift-Enter to get up there and if I need to see the Properties Alt-Shift-Enter, take a look at the Properties and go right back. So, that's one cool thing you can do here. Now, I want to show you something, just for you control freaks, so you can see something, I'm going to go back to Design so that we see the Tools, I mean the Controls, on the left side. When I mouse over these things, right, and they come in and out, if they're not moving at the right speed you can go to Tools, Options, and there's, right here on General, under Environment, you can change the Speed. So I always tell my classes, right, if you're being paid by the hour set that thing slow, and notice now it'll come out but it comes out a whole lot slower than what it did, and it goes back in a lot slower. And actually, if you're getting really well paid by the hour, right, drag that thing down there and notice how slow it comes out now. So, I don't know why you would really honestly set it that slow. Obviously that wouldn't be ethical to do that to a client, but you can get more of a smooth action if you like that. Notice also you can go tell this thing, if you put it way over to the right it'll go really fast, or you can just turn this off and they will simply just appear. OK. And then I can turn it off over here, and then when I mouse over it, it just appears. So you can play with that and change it. But you can see there are a lot of things that you can do for the screen real estate here and I'm going to turn that back on and set my speed at a normal speed. And then I want to finish up by showing you one more thing here. If I come out here and nail the Toolbox, or Pin the Toolbox that's called Ð you'll hear some people call it nailing it Ð I will Pin that one out there. If I go to the Code you will notice that the Code's running off the side of the screen. Now I can cheat a little space here and I can cheat a little here, but it's still running off the side of the screen, so what can I do? Well, there's a really cool thing that I can do with the Editor, and that is I can go to Tools and Options again, and you'll notice there are a lot of things going on here. Now we were in the Environment on the General tab, changing the speed, but if you'll scroll down and go into the Text Editor section and do All Languages, notice I can turn on Word Wrap, OK, and if I click OK you will notice that it's now wrapping everything here, and so nothing's moving off the screen. There's no scroll bar down here now. I hope that makes sense to you. So, I've turned On Word Wrap so no matter how large or small my screen area is it wraps it so I can see all the code without having to scroll. A lot of cool things you can do with real estate in Visual Studio 2008. There's just some little simple tips and tricks; so play with those, make this environment just like you enjoy it being so that you can be the most productive, and don't worry about how other people do it. This is a very personal thing, so set it the way you like it and get productive.