I needed to change a bunch of project references such that they referenced a different location so that I could provide a solution to a 3rd party for a review. The idea of going thru 20 some projects and removing and re-adding the references was not appealing, so much that I thought about writing an application. I’ve learned my lesson though, and decided to Google to see if something was already written, and came across Cool Commands.
Cool Commands was written by Gaston Milano of Deklarit. It’s a very good plug-in, it just doesn’t have much documentation, and since the tool is free, I’m not complaining.
Install
I was unsure how to install the plug-in, as there is no documentation, other then to unzip and run the setup.bat from a VS command prompt.
- Download Cool Commands from this Direct download link
- UnZip – I unzipped to %MyDocuments%\Visual Studio 2005\AddIns\CoolCommands. I would suggest unzipping to a permenant location, and not a temp folder.
- Open up VS 2005 command prompt (you must run this as an administrator)
- Navigate to where you unzipped Cool Commands and run Setup.bat.
- The step where devenv /setup is run, took about 1 minute to run on my computer, so you should expect this.
- Start up VS 2005 and load a project to test it out.
- Review this blog post for a good overview.
Summary
While commands does not have a find and replace reference, which is what I exactly needed, the global remove and add reference was close enough. Also, all the extra features more then made of for the lack of an exact solution.
Tempting fate, I decided to try installing Cool Commands for VS 2008. I copied cool commands to by Addins folder under 2008 and ran the setup from a VS 2008 command prompt, which succeeded without error. However, none of the options are available in the context menu, so it looks like it needs to be updated for VS 2008.
References
- Gaston’s Blog
- Another post from Gaston’s blog
- Link on SharpToolbox to Cool Commands. Be sure to check out the rest of Sharp Toolbox, as it has a searchable library of addins and tools for Visual Studio.
- Blog post by Brian Schroer which gives a pretty good overview of the tool
- Direct download link for version 4.0, which is the latest version from what I can tell.
CoolCommands in Visual Studio 2008
After installing VS2008, I quickly noticed the absence of some of my favorite IDE helpers.
* How do I copy project references between projects?
* How do I locate the current document in the solution explorer, without turning on that annoying "track active" option
No problem.. I’ll just reinstall CoolCommands, or as I like to call it "Commands That Microsoft Should Have included, but didn’t"
For the uninitiated, learn about coolcommands here –>http://weblogs.asp.net/GMilano/archive/2006/02/27/439208.aspx
so first of all, I had a heck of a time finding a version available for download. Luckily I know some one who’s much better an googling than I… CoolCommands download is available here –> http://download.deklarit.com/files/gmilano/coolcommands40.zip
There is an issue with the install.bat however. This version was meant to install into vs2005. To install coolcommands for VS2008, modify the setup bat file. Replace the line that begins regpkg with this
regpkg CoolCommands.dll /root:Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0 /codebase
run the setup and start up vs2008 and off you go.
I’m back in CoolCommand splendor.
http://geekswithblogs.net/SoftwareDoneRight/archive/2007/12/12/coolcommands-in-visual-studio-2008.aspx