Features

General Features

Enable Time Savers

The Enable Time Savers setting, found in Tools | Options | Time Savers | General, allows you to temporarily disable all Time Savers features with one simple setting.

This may come in handy if you ever need to suspend Time Savers for whatever reason.

Solution Features

Close Solution

The Close Solution feature adds a context menu button, to provide an easy way to close the current solution without having to use File | Close Solution.

This can be especially handy if you're already using the mouse in Solution Explorer.

Note

If you're already using the keyboard, you can always use Visual Studio's built-in ALT-F, L to close it that way too.

Edit Solution

The Edit Solution feature provides a context menu button, to provide a simple way to open the current solution's .sln file, to view or modify its contents.

The file is opened in a Visual Studio xml editor tab.

Re-open Start Page

When enabled, the Re-open Start Page feature automatically re-opens the start page whenever the current solution is closed. This comes in handy if you use the pin multiple projects to the start page as your preferred method of opening projects.

Project Features

Edit Project

The Edit Project feature provides a context menu button, to provide a simple way to open a project's .csproj file, to view or modify its contents.

The file is opened in a Visual Studio xml editor tab.

Build Features

Rebuild Solution

The Rebuild Solution feature adds a toolbar button, to provide a convenient one-click way to rebuild the whole solution.

Rebuild Project

The Rebuild Project feature adds a toolbar button, to provide a convenient one-click way to rebuild just the current project.

Note

The current project is a selected project in Solution Explorer, the project that contains a selected file/folder in Solution Explorer, or the project to which the active code document belongs.

Cancel Build

The Cancel Build feature adds a toolbar button, to provide a convenient one-click way to cancel a running build/rebuild.

Developer Features

Activity Log

The Activity Log feature adds a toolbar button, to provide a convenient way to open Visual Studio's activity log. This is particularly useful if an extension is misbehaving, or if you get a message from Visual Studio to look at the file for more details.

Note

The activity log file's path is %APPDATA%\Microsoft\VisualStudio\version\ActivityLog.xml, where:

  • %APPDATA% represents the value in the APPDATA environment variable
  • version represents the current Visual Studio version (ie 15.0 etc)

Diagnostic Log

The Diagnostic Log feature adds a toolbar button, to provide an easy way to open the most recent MSBuild diagnostic log file.

Note

The diagnostic log file's path is: %LOCALAPPDATA%\Temp\MSBuild_guid.failure.txt, where:

  • %LOCALAPPDATA% represents the value in the LOCALAPPDATA environment variable
  • guid represents a random guid value

Path Variables

The Path Variables feature adds a toolbar button, to provide a convenient way to display the current set of Windows paths variable values without the need to open a commpand prompt.

Visual Studio Features

Extensions and Updates

The Extensions and Updates feature adds a toolbar button, to provide a convenient way one-click way to open the Extensions and Updates dialog.

Restart Features

From time to time you may have seen a dialog box offering to restart Visual Studio. Yet there's never been a way to trigger this yourself. The two features explained below, allow you to unlock Visual Studio's built-in ability to restart itself anytime that you want, without manually closing and re-opening the application.

Note

Visual Studio will attempt to re-open the project that was open at the time of triggering the restart, whereas manually closing and re-opening it may not depending on your Tools | Options | Environment | Startup setting.

Restart Visual Studio

The Restart Visual Studio feature adds a toolbar button, that provides a one-click way to restart Visual Studio.

Note

If Visual Studio was opened as administrator, using this 2 restart Visual Studio, it will still be opened as administrator.

The only way to get a normal session again is to close/re-open Visual Studio manually.

Restart Visual Studio as Administrator

The Restart Visual Studio as Administrator feature adds a toolbar button, that provides a two-click way to restart Visual Studio as administrator (aka an elevated session).

Options Features

Time Savers Options

The Time Savers Options feature adds a toolbar button, that provides a simple one-click way to open the Tools | Options dialog with the Time Savers node expanded, and the General option selected.

Keyboard Options

The Keyboard Options feature adds a toolbar button, that provides a two-click way to open the Tools | Options dialog with the Environment node expanded, and the Keyboard option selected.

This can save a lot of time when you add/test a number of keyboard shortcuts, or need to look up a keyboard. shortcut