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VS.NET Tip #7 - Start Page: "My Profile" ... and yours.
If you have used VS.NET, then you are probably already aware of the Start Page. The Visual Studio .NET Start Page provides easy access to many useful resources, including recent projects that you have worked on, new product information and links to newsgroups. As cool as these features are, they are mostly self-explanatory. But one of the most important yet most overlooked items is the "My Profile" link. The My Profile link is the last link on the Start Page but, arguably, should be the first one you should look at because it can help you become more productive when you make the jump from your current IDE to VS.NET (and you will!) Let's say you are a Visual C++ programmer and you really like the old VC++ IDE. Did you know that get the old" Visual C++ look in the new Visual Studio .NET environment? If you are a VB programmer or a Visual Interdev user, you can customize the environment so that it looks like your old IDE too. The My Profile link gives you easy access to all that. Here's how:
1. Go to the Start Page (if you can't see your start page, you can always display it using the Help | Show Start Page menu item.)
2. Click the My Profile link.
3. Under Profile , click to select Visual C++ Developer from the drop-down list box.
4. Under Window Layout , click to select Visual C++ 6 . This process will provide you with the Visual C++ 6.0 appearance in the Visual Studio .NET environment.
If you want the VB look, you simply choose the Visual Basic Developer Profile. Ditto for Visual Studio, Visual Interdev, etc. You can also customize your profile and pick the best of any of the environments. For example, you can pick a Visual Basic Keyboard layout and the Visual C++ Windows Layout.
Since we are on the My Profile link, we should touch on the rest of the features on this page. The "Help Filter" lets you narrow down the samples that the online help searches through. The filter helps by targeting the area that you are working on like C#, the .NET Framework SDK and many others.
The "Show Help" radio buttons specify whether to display Help within a window in the IDE or in a separate window available outside of the IDE. This is really a matter of personal preference -- there is a lot going on inside the IDE and even with Auto Hide on, you may decide that an external help window is just easier to deal with.
Finally, the "At Startup Show" dropdown allows you to specify what user interface appears when Visual Studio is started. You can choose from Show Start Page, Load last loaded Solution, Show Open Project dialog box, Show New Project dialog box, and Show empty environment.
As with everything in VS.NET, you can change many of these settings in the Tools | Options... dialog. But the My Profiles tab of the Start Page puts many of the more useful features all in one place.
That's all I know! Next, we'll explore the Help system. See ya!
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