There are a couple of easy solutions to this problem. Firstly, you can simply stop the Output window from being automatically shown during a build. Open the Options dialog (Tools->Options) and select Projects and Solutions. You will find an option under here called Show Output window when build starts. Simply uncheck this option and you will never be interrupted again.

However many people, myself included, have found that the Output window is actually quite useful to have around. If that’s the case, you may want to have it automatically open, but in a different way. My suggestion is to try changing the Output window to display as a Tabbed Document. Simply right-click on the window title bar and select Tabbed Document as shown below:

Once you’ve made this change, the Output window will open at the same level as the active code window. It will still come to the foreground, which I find useful, however to me it feels like it does this in a much more natural and frictionless way. I’d be very interested to hear whether anyone else prefers this also.

To wrap up this post, here’s a couple more things about the Output window that are useful to know:

• Press Ctrl+Alt+O to display and bring the Output window into focus;
• Press Ctrl+S when the Output window has focus to save the text in the Output window to an external file;
• If you do choose to not automatically display the Output window during a build, you can redirect all Diagnostic messages (e.g. Debug.Print) to the Immediate Window, as mentioned in my first Debugging Tip of the Week.

Unfortunately visual effects such as the tool window animation come at a cost. In this case it is the frustration of having to wait until the tool window is fully expanded before you interact with it. Further more if you accidentally moved your mouse over the tab the window will still expand and will remain expanded until you set the focus elsewhere.

Luckily Visual Studio gives us an easy way to administer (read “disable”) this feature. From the Tools–>Options dialog, if you select the Environment–>General node you will see that there is an “Animate environment tools” checkbox and slider, as shown below. If you like the animation but just wish it would go a bit quicker you can just up the speed. However, if you are like me, you will just want to uncheck this box (after all anything that gets Visual Studio to work a bit quicker must be a good thing!).

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.

In Visual Studio select Tools->Options… and then Environment->Fonts and Colors from the menu. Make sure you only select the fonts that are highlighted in bold, as they are the monospaced ones. Otherwise you’ll end up reducing your productivity by at least 90% like I did

I spent some time experimenting with the different fonts available to me (on a fairly standard Vista machine). I have to agree with Jeff Atwood and say that Consolas is my choice for the award of “Best Windows Programming Font”.

This is not surprising at all, since Consolas was specifically designed for programming environments. Microsoft commissioned a well-respected dutch type designer, Luc(as) de Groot, to design this font as a ClearType-optimised replacement for Courier New.

Consolas is included by default with Vista and Office 2007. Also just to hammer home the point that it is the ideal programming font, it is available to download for licensed users of Visual Studio 2005 as an MSI install that will change the default text face in Visual Studio to the Consolas family.

Given the above, one would wonder why the default font for Visual Studio 2008 (Beta 2) is still Courier New. Perhaps this will change before it is shipped.

Here’s a comparison of Courier New and Consolas.

Courier New:

Consolas:

One final point to note – I mentioned earlier that it has been optimised for ClearType. Make sure make sure that ClearType is enabled, as Consolas looks terrible without it.