Recently I have been getting a lot of positive feedback for my work around the Visual Studio tricks. I try to make the video tricks under 90 seconds, and while the original Video Tips were a replay on Sara Ford’s original tips, I’m ramping up to get the tips out starting for the new Visual Studio 2010.

When a new tip is released, the RSS feed is updated, and the twitter feed for @VSTricks is updated. Those are the only two traffic sources. Well the search engines pick it up also, so eventually traffic will come from organic search, but the same day traffic comes from the RSS and Twitter. The Visual Studio tricks do take a long time to put together, and a lot of people like them. Well I get a lot of positive feedback, so I’m assuming they are favorable to many thousands that view, and don’t leave comments. It is a community project, and at the end of the day, it’s just me, a single blogger putting these together.

With this in mind, I would like to do a promotion. I have an extra copy of a licensed Visual Studio Professional 2008. Not an academic, but a full version. It is a Not for Resale, so you can’t win it, and expect to get anything out of it, other than the great usage of the software.

So how do you play? How do you win?

To Play. Just promote the twitter account @VSTricks on your twitter feed to your friends. Use your own words and talk about @VSTricks, and how it’s been helpful to you. Maybe link to your favorite video trick. Whatever, it’s up to you. My goal here is simple, build the list of users following @VSTricks.

To Win. I will gather all the user names, that mention @VSTricks in their twitter feed between now and Dec 4th at noon my time, GMT-7. I’ll take all the user names into excel and scramble them, many, many, many times. This process will be recorded, and posted online, so you’ll know the winner is purely random.

The @VSTricks account will notify the winner, and I’ll ship the disk wit the serial number to an address supplied by the winner.

I’m really hoping to keep things simple, promote the twitter account @VSTricks, and at the same time give-a-way some great software to someone that could really use it. If the winner does in fact not need the software (maybe the winner already owns a copy???), I’ll fall back to the second randomly picked winner, and then third, forth, fifth and so on.

UPDATE: Dec 10th, 2009 A winner has been picked, and the video shows all. Who entered (all 17 of you), how it was random, and the announcement being made in TweetDeck 🙂 Isn’t video great?

In Visual Studio 2008, you could turn on the keyboard bindings to be displayed with the Tooltips. For example, if you hover over the save icon, you would also see CTRL+S. This was tip #64 for 2008, but seems to be missing from 2010. And I looked in every place I could, including the registry.

Now it’s possible that these can still be turned on somewhere, somehow, but I can’t find it. Maybe it was excluded because of performance? Maybe it can be programmed as a custom Tooltip Adorner? I don’t know, but maybe with this post, we’ll get an answer from the team.

From now on, all tricks will be recorded using Visual Studio 2010, starting with the Beta2 Ultimate product. You’ll also notice that these are playing with YouTube now, since the announcement from Microsoft that Silverlight Live Hosting services will be going away.

Anyway — this is a simple tip to show changing the background color of the selected text in the Text Editor.

As you know from reading the original tips/tricks series, my goal when starting to record the series was to put video to Sara Fords original Tips and Tricks. She has about 380 at last count. I’ve been wondering what to do with the tips/tricks after I’m done recording her series, and I’ve decided to just continue the numbering, but skip a head a little bit. This gives me a little wiggle room if Sara is going to ever add any more tips, as well as a fresh start to the tips/tricks I’m going to record on my own.

So tip #500 is just a welcome to … well … more tips.

Already I’ve found some things in Visual Studio 2010 that are new … and I can’t wait to show them off.

In fact, stand by for just a few minutes, one of the first tips is a replay on Block Select, with the new features added in 2010.

Ever try to search for something you know exists, BUT … the Quick Find just can’t find it? Is it possible that the text you’re looking for is in a hidden region? This video shows you how toe search hidden text in collapsed regions.

[CTRL]+[F] brings up the Find and Replace tool window.  You can then expand the Find options chevron control and select Search hidden text.  This is usually the first option I always set (or ensure is set)