Confessions of a Keytarist

Firstly, I couldn’t come up with a “snappy” title for this post, so went with the above. I guess I’m too busy to be even marginally creative!

I have recently been working with a multiple web project solution in Visual Studio. For ages, I’ve been switching between each web project by stopping debugging, setting the other as the start up project, and then starting debugging again. As you can imagine, this makes testing interoperability between the two quite a drag.

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A colleague came to me today asking if I knew of any way to remove the close button from a windows form, but still show the minimize and maximize buttons.

On the face of it, it sounded like an easy answer. I knew you could disable both the minimize and maximize buttons very easily from within the Visual Studio GUI – so surely there’s an option for the third button; the close button?
Actually, no. Whilst you can remove all three buttons in one go (changing the setting “ControlBox” to false.) and as previously mentioned, you can disable the maximize and minimize buttons (“MaximizeBox” and “MinimizeBox” settings respectively), there is no setting to directly control the Close button.

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I stumbled across what appears to be an excellent program / plugin; VS.php
It allows for the development, debugging and testing of php files within Visual Studio 2008!

Although it doesn’t have a visual designer, which might scare some people off, I’m a firm believer that visual web “designers” are a bad thing anyway
What it does have is an in-built version of Apache webserver, which takes away the pain of configuring Apache on your local machine to test your sites.
It also supports IIS 6 & 7 with FastCGI.

One of the newest features is the direct support for developing Silverlight 3 applications alongside your php scripts. This means you can have one project that contains both php and Silverlight 3 source files.

On top of that, it also has full intellisense built in!

The only downside is that this cool application isn’t free, but at only $99 and with a 30-day free trial, it’s not a huge expense and would probably be a great buy for anyone who uses Visual Studio a lot, but also writes scripts in PHP.

Check it out here: http://www.jcxsoftware.com/vs.php