Brian On Software

Here’s one of those little tips that can save you time and useless brain processing when the need arises.  When developing in Visual Studio, does it ever happen that you need to read some documentation pertaining to your current work?  In my case it happens a lot.  I don’t like to switch context and fire up a web browser to find the needed documentation, or even launch Windows Explorer to find that document in some obscure, deep directory hierarchy.  No, instead I like to have everything I need, whether tools or documentations, under my fingers in one place: inside Visual Studio. 

Two documentations that I use the most when programming in .NET are the ReSharper 4.5 Default Keymaps and the C# Language Specification (ECMA-334).  In order to quickly access those two documents (and future documents I might need), I simply created an entry in the External Tools section of Visual Studio.  In order to do this, you can follow these simple steps:

1. Go to Tools -> External Tools…
2. In the External Tools window, click on the Add button to create a new entry
3. Fill in the required information, such as Title, Command, Arguments, etc.  In my case, the Command is simply the path to the executable of my favorite PDF reader (Foxit Reader) and the Arguments is simply the path to the PDF file.  You can also define a keyboard shortcut for them by prefixing the “&” symbol to one of the letters that aren’t already defined as shortcuts. 
4. When you’re done, click on OK. 

Take a look at the following screenshot:

With this little setup, I don’t need to go to either the ReSharper or ECMA’s website, not even launch Windows Explorer to look for those files.  I have access to those files directly from Visual Studio.  No more context switching.