C# menustrip designer - visual-studio

I'm not sure when this happened but when I was trying to edit a menustrip in my program (in the VS designer), I noticed that the menu items had to be grouped or merged. Like:
File Edit Format Insert ...
Instead of being able to click each menu item and add sub-items to them in the designer, they all were grouped together so I couldn't edit the menu items separately, it's quite painful.
I couldn't find any properties related to this, so how could I ungroup the menu items in the designer?

Nevermind, it turns out the designer became weird. When I wanted to add an event to the main menustrip, nothing even happened. Restarting VS seemed to have fixed it. Still quite odd.

Related

VS 2008 Under debug menu the "Save Dump As..." tab appearing many times

I'm using Visual Studio 2008 for a while now and i just noticed that under the "Debug" menu there are many disabled tabs of "Save Dump As...".
There are so many tabs like this that i can scroll the debug menu and it seems like i can't even reach the end of it all. I want to know why it is happening and how can i solve it.
I managed to find where i can edit this menu, in VS they call it "Commands".
Under "Tools->Customize->Rearrange commands..." select your current menu bar and remove the unnecessary command.
I still don't know why this is happening, but now it's easy to maintain.
You can also rearrange the menus as you wish, which is nice.

Windows Forms program shows menu items as checked in designer and as a colored block when program runs

I've written a program in VS using C#, Forms and .Net Framework 4.8. In the Designer, menu items show as checked. When I run the program the items show with a colored block instead of a check. I've searched but can't seem to find any reference to a problem like this.
Menu in Designer
Menu at run-time
I figured out what the problem was. On the menuitem properties, there's a property called "ImageScaling" that defaults to 'SizeToFit'. As soon as I set that to 'None' the check mark was in a small blue box (as I wanted it to be). Thanks for your attention.

Attaching To Work Item With Checkbox

We recently upgraded our TFS 2010 to TFS 2013. I like most of the changes, but some of them not so much. Did Microsoft really took away the feature that was in TFS 2010 where one could attach to an work item by checking a checkbox next to the work item? The way I currently do in TFS 2013 is, before checking in I run my TFS query, remember the work item number, then do 'Add By Id' or something like that, type the ID and enter. It might not seem big deal to many, but I absolutely do not like this. Is there a way to get those checkboxes next to the work item back? If not, is there a better way to do that process?
It has changed a little but I guess the closest experience is to create a personal query or add a shared query to your favourites.
In the Pending Changes Window under Related Work Items click the Queries drop down and select the relevant query.
The results will open in the main window and you can drag and drop a work item into the Related Work Items section which will link it to your changeset.
If you have VS Premium or Ultimate then you can use the My Work window in Team Explorer which will list your assigned work items in the Available Work Items section and you can just drag them into In Progress Work.

Solution Explorer Context Menu Too Long

Ok, so I installed plenty of useful extensions from Extension Manager in Visual Studio 2010.
I really like them but now my context menu in solution explorer is way too long.
So long in fact that I have to scroll down/up using little arrows which is really annoying.
Any solution to that anyone?
The problem is that when you right-click on an entity within the Solution Explorer, the resulting context menu is so loaded down with options, extensions, menus, lists and levels that you have to start scrolling around to get anywhere.
The solution is to declutter that context menu by removing unneccessary items. This can be achieved through the Commands tab of the Tools -> Customize dialog. Specifically, click on the Commands tab, and select the Context Menu button to start customizing anything and (almost) everything to do with those context menus.
Many of the entities within the Solution Explorer have some sort of representation here; the biggest issue you have will be finding the right place to start customizing.
For example, I have a method of Source Control integrated within the Visual Studio environment which causes 7 new menu items to appear when I right-click on a project (Check In, Check Out, Get Latest Version, etc). I do all of my source controlling outside of Visual Studio, so these menu items are just clutter to me. I go to Project and Solution Context Menu | Project and delete anything and everything related to Source Control. Now, when I right-click on a project, none of those options appear in the menu.

Customizing toolbar items in VS2010

Has the menu & toolbar customization functionality in VS2010 been reduced?
I can't seem to be able to select an icon for an added command, nor set it to be icon-only. Previous versions of Visual Studio supported this functionality and even allowed the creation/editing of custom icons.
Is this something that has suffered as a result of the move to the WPF-authored UI or am I missing something?
Seems like this functionality was cut from Visual Studio 2010. This post has some info in the comments: Customizing Visual Studio 2010
Specifically - "Unfortunately assigning or editing icons to commands through Customize dialog is not possible in VS2010. It is one of the features got cut for lack of time. This is however something we'll consider adding back in next version."
The reply also has a longer explanation of a workaround.
As noted in the link mentioned in the answer from #Gordon Mackie JoanMiro, the REASON for the reduced functionality is that the VS Shell team migrated the entire UI (shell and command system) from Win32 to one based solely on WPF. This was a gargantuan task, I would imagine. However, a couple workarounds are now available:
You can export previously saved settings from VS 2008 and import them into VS 2010. That includes command bar customizations (as noted by #Don)
A more recent blog-post contains detailed instructions for using a new extension to VS2010 (available on Visual Studio Gallery) that allows users to change the images on the command UI. (Note that the old drag&drop customization interface is still not supported in this new extension.)
If you have custom icons, any attempt to make ANY changes to the tool bar will result in the custom icons disappearing and being replaced by text when you restart VS2010.
The only way I found to get my custom icons without text into VS2010 is to open VS2008, set up all of the tool bars the way I want, including custom icons, then export the settings (Tools| Import and Export Settings). Then open VS2010 and import those settings. Tedious, I know, but it allows me to have a down arrow icon that searches for the next instance of the word my cursor is on.
I have been trying to customize VS2010 toolbars/keyboard and what took a few minutes in previous versions takes hours now. The new system looks real pretty but is useless in practice. Apart from the fact you just can't do (like change the appearance of buttons as mentioned above) the things you can do are extremely time-consuming and annoying.
Why is it every new version of VS loses something really useful? Other examples:
VC++5 introduced a new HTML help system. Pressing F1 on a function name used to immediately show help for that function. After VC++5 getting context help became annoyingly much slower, and is still very slow (and inaccurate).
VS.Net (aka VS2002 or VC++7) had a useless bookmark system compared to VC++6. VS2010 bookmarks are better but not perfect.
VS.Net removed the search state buttons "whole word", "case sensitive" etc. These were possibly the most useful buttons ever as they quickly allowed you to see why a search may have failed.
I found a great extension: CommandingImage
It does not have an icon editor, but you can create your images as 16x16 png format (for transparency) and import it (I recommend Paint.Net)
Dave, here's how to add toolbar buttons:
1) in the IDE, find the down arrow looking thing on the far right of a toolbar and click on Add Remove Buttons, Customize
2) in the Customize window select the Menu Bar radio button then select the appropriate menu bar that you want to add a button to
3) click the "Add Command..." button
4) select the appropriate Category and Command button that you want to add, then click OK.
The command button you selected will be added to the menu bar you selected. You can move the button up or down.
I think this is what you are looking for.
Good luck!

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