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Did you know… You can run external tools within Visual Studio? - #201

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It’s the External Tools Tip of the Day series!!

Okay I have to admit, I’m not the local expert in External Tools, so I could really use help with examples.  I can talk about the functionality all day long, but nothing is better than real world examples.

Let’s start with the basics.  Go to Tools – External Tools to bring up the External Tools dialog.  You’ll notice a set of built-in tools ready to go for you.

Tools - External Tools

Note that I circled the list of external tools.  This list maps directly to the list presented in the Tools menu, as shown below.

External tools listed on Tools menu

The first time I made this connection I was taken aback.  I probably saw this list of tools for years, but never knew it came directly from the External Tools dialog.

Technorati Tags: VS2005Tip,VS2008Tip

Comments

  • Anonymous
    April 24, 2008
    I have a bunch of External Tools set up.  Some examples are invoking MSBuild for a custom build file and getting the strong-name signature for a signed (and compiled) project.

  • Anonymous
    April 24, 2008
    > but never knew it came directly from the External Tools dialog You mean there's a human being behind this blog? :-)

  • Anonymous
    April 24, 2008
    I have several of the TF Power Tools linked there, such as Branch History and Blame/Annotate. It's easy to set the arguments to the currently active file, so it's almost like they're built in. The other tip is to assign them keyboard shortcuts, which is a pain because they show up there as "External Tool 1", and I've got do figure out which tool that means.

  • Anonymous
    April 24, 2008
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    April 24, 2008
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    April 25, 2008
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    April 28, 2008
    This is my favorite external tool: Windows Explorer http://dotnettipoftheday.org/tips/explorer-in-tools-menu.aspx I also set a keybinding, so I can select the file from the solution explorer, press CTRL + M, CTRL + E and see the file in Explorer. This is extremely handy for batch files in the solution and editing the Web.config outside of source control.

  • Anonymous
    January 04, 2009
    本篇包括tip191-tip200http://www.watch-life.net/visual-studio/visual-studio-2008-tip-day-21.html#201、在v...