Usually when I'm coding I'm using the latest and greatest tech but sometimes I have a need to use a specific version of a plugin or framework for backward compatability with a Visual Studio project.

I ran into an issue the other day where I needed to run a specific version of TypeScript that was older than the current version on my computer. I downloaded the older file and installed it all without any issues. I opened Visual Studio 2012 (as the project I was using requires that version) and everything was working perfectly.

I was using an old Macbook Air (2010) as my ASP.NET web development machine since it was released in October 2010. Since the release of Visual Studio 2012 though it was feeling it's age and things were starting to slow down. Using Visual Studio along with ReSharper was a pretty bad experience on the machine. Opening projects and pages took around 10-30 secs.

I had a look around at actual Windows laptops to see what was on the market but nothing was really taking my fancy. The Macbook Air with it's SSD had spoilt me and the majority of PC laptops only had 256gb drive paired with 4gb RAM which was too low for my requirements.

I've noticed that some members of my team were having difficulties with Visual Studio when using resource files. Any time they would open a file it would crash Visual Studio. As you can imagine this was very frustrating for all involved.

After a quick search I found a pretty neat alterative editor called 'Simple Resx Editor' by Matías. Currently this resource editor is at version 0.6.2 but it is being worked on at the time to improve the functions available.

The main benefit I like about this editor is that you can open all your resource files, side by side and edit them all in one quick go. This is a perfect setup when dealing with multiple languages as it really speeds things up. If you just want to work on one resource file and you need to know what the Key Name values are simply click on the big Key icon on the top of the app. This little app is small, quick to use and really offers a benefit over the built in editor in Visual Studio in my opinion.

The only snag I noticed while working with the editor is that if you had a very long Value field there are no scrollbars showing. I've left a message to Matías about this issue and I'm sure this will be fixed in the next version of this software.

Before I moved over to Visual Studio I used to code in Dreamweaver. One feature within Dreamweaver that I always found handy was the Find All option for finding all occurrences of the search criteria I had entered.

I always thought that this was a feature missing in Visual Studio as there was no option on the 'Quick Find' (ctrl + F) to find all. The only option on the quick find is to 'find and replace all' which usually isn't what I want to do.

The good news is that Visual Studio has a Find All built into it. To find the option (excuse the pun!) all you need to do is hold Ctrl and Shift and press F or click on Edit -> Find and Replace -> Find In Files. This will open up a dialog box that will let you enter your search criteria. Simply hit the Find All button and you will see a list of results returned to you that match your criteria. You can then double click on any of the search results to go directly to that line of code.

It's a small thing but it's handy to know where to go to use that option. Hopefully it will help someone else out.

I actually really like how Visual Studio renames my ID values when pasting content to ensure that all ID values are unique - as they should be. However, the designers on my team always give me a hard time over this as they say it slows them down and that they would prefer if the system would let them decide when to rename ID values. I can see their point if they are copying and pasting code from other project that this 'feature' would soon become very annoying.

So to turn off this feature all you need to do is follow the steps below:

Step1: Go to the menu bar and click on 'Tools' and then 'Options'.

Step 2: On the popup screen than appears there is a little checkbox in the lower left corner that says 'Show All Settings'. Make sure that is selected.

Step 3: Expand the 'TextEditor' option and expand the 'HTML' option.

Step 4: Click on 'Miscellaneous' and untick the option 'Auto ID elements on paste in Source view'.

Step 5: Click OK and now when you paste any html content or code with the same ID values as what is in your project Visual Studio will not rename the IDs.

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