In case you’re like me and like typing your HTML manually without the use of the Designer then you may find the following tip very useful and handy. When you add an attribute inside any element and put the equal sign “=” Visual Studio can automatically insert quotes (opening and closing) for you and put the cursor between them. This way you can type the attribute value right away without wasting any time.
How to enable this
- Open Visual Studio 2008
- Navigate to Tools –> Options
- Check the checkbox named “Show all settings” at the left bottom corner of the window
- Expand the Text Editor tag
- Expand the HTML tag
- Click on the Format sub menu item
- At the Automatic formatting options section check the first checkbox named Insert attribute value quotes when typing (I personally have all options checked in this section)
I like this feature a lot since it increases my productivity and makes HTML editing much pleasant.
My favorite application for writing posts for my blogs is Windows Live Writer. It’s very flexible and pretty simple to use and works perfectly with my blog service. In addition it can be extended with plug-ins and there are plenty of them that can be found and downloaded from here.
One absolutely useful feature that I use in each post is Auto Linking. Quite often while writing a post you find yourself inserting links to external resources or other posts. In case you add same link very often you can save time by adding it to the Auto Links list and next time its addition will be much faster thus making you more productive and allows you to concentrate on the post content only.
How to configure it
Click on the Tools –> Options menu item on the main window. On the left side of the opened window choose the Auto Linking option. Here you can manage the list of your commonly used links – add/edit/delete.
Another quick way to add link to auto linking glossary is by adding a new link manually and checking the option named Automatically link to this text. I believe this is the fastest and natural way of doing it.
Live Writer can be downloaded for FREE from Windows Live Essentials.
Enjoy it !
