By default Visual Studio 2010 comes with Intellisense feature enabled. By the way, there are some cases that it’s disabled – can be caused by anything (setting changes on add-in installation, importing settings, human error, your teammate , etc).

The fix is simple, just open the Tools –> Options, then go to the Text Editor section. Select All Languages or specific language (in this example C#).

Then make sure Auto list members and Parameters information are checked. Click OK and it should be working now.

intellisense · Tips & Tricks · VS2010 · VS2010-Tips

If you’re not comfortable with Visual Studio 2010’s help viewer (Microsoft Help Viewer 1.0), then H3Viewer will be a good alternative for you.

This is much like the help viewer of Visual Studio 2005 ad Visual Studio 2008.

What are you waiting for? Download it for FREE.

H3Viewer · Tips & Tricks · VS2010 · VS2010-Tips

Visual Studio 2010 comes with a new Help viewer. If you didn’t realize that, run the Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Documentation and you will see what I mean (I assume you have installed it when you’re installing VS2010).

Even though it provides lighter experience and updateable help contents, the pain starts when you’re updating the help contents. See this.

I highlighted the estimate download size. Unfortunately we can’t choose which library content to update, so we cannot reduce it.

I have VS2010 installed in my 2 computers, so you can calculate the size I will need to update the contents.

How about a team of 100 developers? how much the download size needed?

Fortunately there is workaround for this written in Paul O’Rear’s blog.

Let me copy over the steps:

1. On a single machine, launch Help Library Manager from the Visual Studio 2010 IDE using Help | Manage Help Settings
2. Install and update any content that you wish to be available on all other machines using Help Library Manager.
3. Open the settings screen from Help Library Manager, by clicking on the Settings link on the upper right. Note the path of the Local Store that should appear grayed out in the lower half of the dialog. The default path if you did not change anything during setup would be: %ALLUSERSPROFILE%\Microsoft\HelpLibrary. In Windows 7 this will probably translate to C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\HelpLibrary.
4. On any other machine that you wish to update with the same changes
   1. Ensure that the Help system is closed down – close any browser that may currently be displaying local help. Ensure that you are not running Help Library Manager and that the Help Library Agent is also closed down (right click on the Help Library Agent tray application and select Exit).
   2. Copy the entire Help Library folder from the first machine over to the same location on the machine you wish to update.

There is also important to highlight from his post.
”Please note that this is not a supported scenario. We recommend taking a backup before proceeding with these steps! Please note also that you will need to have Admin privileges on any machine that you wish to perform this operation.”

Hope this information helpful for you.

help-viewer · Tips & Tricks · VS2010 · VS2010-Tips

In some forums in found that people asking whether he/she can install Visual Studio 2010 side-by-side with earlier version(s) of it.

The answer is YES.

I have Visual Studio 2005, Visual Studio 2008, and Visual Studio 2010 installed in one machine (OS is Vista Ultimate 32bit).

If I open Program Files, I can see that they are installed in different folders.

So you don’t need to worry to install Visual Studio 2010 in the same machine having previous version installed.

Even though you can install in random of back-ward order, I suggest to install in forward order, VS2005 –> VS2008 –> VS2010.

Having more than one version of visual studio installed is useful if you’re working with a lot of projects built using different version of Visual Studio. Because although VS2010 provides multi-targeting feature for the framework, the Project and Solution is not compatible and sometime upgrading is not a good solution if your client still using VS2005 or VS2008.

Hope this information useful for you.

Tips & Tricks · VS2005 · VS2008 · VS2010 · VS2010-Tips

Multi-targeting feature is one of Visual Studio 2010 goodies. It was firstly introduced in Visual Studio 2008 which able to do multi-targeting for .NET 3.5, .NET 3.0, and .NET 2.0.

In Visual Studio 2010, you will be able to choose between .NET 4, .NET 3.5, .NET 3.0, and .NET 2.0.

.NET Framework 4 is what Visual studio 2010 brought as part of its requirement/prerequisites.

The case is when some of you might want to install Visual Studio 2010 in a fresh box of Windows. You may find that only .NET Framework 4 is available in the dropdown of framework selection of Visual Studio 2010 (above)  after the installation.

Don’t worry, this is something you can fix easily. The solution is by installing .NET Framework 3.5 SP1. That’s it!

This blog post of Visual Web Developer Team can be used for further reference.

Enjoy your days with Visual Studio 2010!

.NET · multi-targeting · Tips & Tricks · VS2010 · VS2010-Tips