You don’t seem to see as many of those “Tip of the Day” dialog boxes in products these days. Whilst not everyone likes them, the “continuous-small-incremental” learning process that they enable works well for a lot of people. Visual Studio doesn’t provide a native “Tip of the Day”, but it through the efforts of a tireless Microsoft employee and the magic of RSS, we can have something equivalent in functionality.

Sara Ford is a Microsoft SDET (Software Development Engineer in Test) who writes an extremely useful blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/saraford/. Since last July she has been churning out her “Visual Studio 2008 Tip of the Day” series. Think the lifehacker of Visual Studio. In her words:

The motivation behind tip of the day comes from when I was a SDET (tester) on the Visual Studio environment. I switched feature areas every 6 months (very unusual) for 4.5 years. And whenever I studied the new test bed, I learned so many new features I never knew existed before.

Some of my favourite postings include:

1. How not to accidentally copy a blank line—This used to be a constant annoyance to me;
2. How to show shortcut keys in toolbar tips—A great way to begin remembering the keyboard shortcuts;
3. How to navigate forward and backwards in the editor all because of go back markers—Advanced navigation is a real timesaver, and it helps to know the idiosyncrasies.

You get the idea—lots of useful tips and tricks. Almost all of the tips also apply to VS 2005, so they are useful even if you can’t upgrade yet.

So, how do we make these appear in Visual Studio? Way back, when you first installed VS 2005, you would have noticed the start page, and its (very infrequently updated) list of Visual Studio “news”. Nowadays, you probably just ignore most of the start page and just use the Recent Projects section in the top left.

Like almost everything else in Visual Studio this start page is customisable. Select Tools->Options… and then Environment->Startup from the menu. Enter the URL for Sara’s RSS feed (http://blogs.msdn.com/saraford/rss.xml) in the “Start Page news channel”, and bump the “Download content every” setting up to its maximum—after all, this is Tip of the Day, not Tip of the Hour!

One limitation of this feature is that you can only specify a single RSS feed for the Start Page. However using a service like FeedJumbler, you can put together a custom aggregate feed of your favourite blogs.

Of course this will cause Visual Studio to visit the Internet each time it is launched, and as such it will slow down the startup time. If you are finding it a little slow to launch, then it is recommended that you change the startup option to “Show Empty Environment” or “Show Open Project dialog box”.

Whatever you decide to do with the Visual Studio Start Page, I highly recommend you subscribe to Sara Ford’s blog in your preferred RSS reader right now, and start learning something useful every day.