VS2010 – tips and tricks – team explorer shortcuts and patterns

In my last post I wrote about how to do a quick comparison using shortcuts and avoiding the mouse.

If you are working with TFS maybe this shortcuts are interesting for you.

Navigate to TFS related tool windows

If you want to navigate to TFS related tool windows like Team Explorer Window or Pending Changes Window you may have noticed that for some of them some keyboard shortcuts are predefined.

The default keyboard binding for Team Explorer is something like CTRL+W, M which is not really related to the name.

I’m a fan of keyboard shortcuts and it’s hard to remember all of them every time. Because of that, I tried to define some smarter keyboard shortcut pattern.

Most of the CTRL+W + character shortcuts are already mapped to other windows. I’m using as an alternative ALT+W for all TFS Team Explorer related windows.

You can see a list below:

VS2010 commands	Shortcut
View.TfsPendingChanges	ALT + W, P
View.TfsSourceControlExplorer	ALT + W, S
View.TeamExplorer	ALT + W, T

VS2010 – tips and tricks - quicker file comparison in pending changes window

Sometimes I need to compare some local pending change of a file to the latest TFS version.

This can be done like in the screenshot below,

• grabbing the mouse,
• right click on the file
• select Compare –> With Latest Version

This is nice if you are a fan of mouse driven development. I’m more the fan of shortcuts so an alternate solution is the following:

• navigate to the pending changes window
• press SHIFT + Double-Left-Mouse-Click on the file or
• SHIFT + Enter for the selected File

then a background comparison is started.

One easy way to navigate to the pending changes window is pressing CTRL + TAB and navigate with the keyboard arrows to the pending changes window.

Another solution would be to configure some shortcut for the pending changes tool window.

Faster XAML editing in VS2010

If you are working with the XAML Editor in VS2010 you’ve maybe realized that it’s much better than with VS2008.

You can even be faster if you change the editor from default XAML Editor to “Source Code (Text) Editor”.

You not only have VS IntelliSense, XML collapsing and the XAML context menu support, also you have full ReSharper support!

How to change the default editor:

1. Right-click on a XAML file in the Solution Explorer
2. Select "Open With..."
3. Select "Source Code (Text) Editor"
4. Click on "Set as Default"
5. Click OK
6. You're done!

With SHIFT + F7 you can change from “Source Code (Text) Editor” to the default XAML editor with its split view, navigator, etc.

Source: http://weblogs.asp.net/fmarguerie/archive/2009/01/29/life-changer-xaml-tip-for-visual-studio.aspx

TFS2010–Single Server Installation COM Error

After installing a new TFS2010 single server instance I had the following error in my event log:

The application-specific permission settings do not grant Local Activation permission for the COM Server application with CLSID
{61738644-F196-11D0-9953-00C04FD919C1}
and APPID
{61738644-F196-11D0-9953-00C04FD919C1}
to the user VB-TFS2010\WSSSERVICE SID (S-1-5-21-1484069085-12520411-2351891930-1013) from address LocalHost (Using LRPC). This security permission can be modified using the Component Services administrative tool.

The problem was that SharePoint Administration Service was running under Local System Account. I realized I forgot to set the appropriate service account.

How to find out that the problem was coming from SharePoint?
Source: http://geekswithblogs.net/mhamilton/archive/2006/12/19/101568.aspx