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.

One of my colleagues showed me that if you set a specific port for Visual Studio’s development server, you can then start the main project (in the normal fashion), but then also start the second project by right-clicking on it, and selecting “run” from the debug menu.

This was a good step forward for me, as previously I wasn’t sure it was possible to achieve debugging across two projects if there was no direct reference defined. However, being the person I was, I wasn’t quite satisfied with having to start one project, then manually starting the second once it had started. So I had a bit of a dive through the various properties and configuration screens within Visual Studio and discovered a method that allows you to start multiple projects, in a defined order, by simply hitting F5.

To do it, right click on the Solution, and choose properties from the context menu. Once the new window appears, ensure “Common Properties”->”Startup Project” is selected from the list on the left.
Then, on the right side of the screen, select the “Multiple startup projects” option. Finally, change the “Action” cell in the table for each project you want to start up when you begin debugging.
If you need to specify or change the order in which projects are selected, you can select the table row for that project, and using the up/down arrow on the right of the page, move it up and down in the startup order.

Quite a neat trick that could have saved me a good deal of ball ache in the earlier parts of this project!

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.

A quick Google search produced a few varied approaches, but the one I suggested my colleague to implement is as follows:

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private const int CP_NOCLOSE_BUTTON = 0x200;
protected override CreateParams CreateParams
{
    get
    {
        CreateParams mdiCp = base.CreateParams;
        mdiCp.ClassStyle = mdiCp.ClassStyle | CP_NOCLOSE_BUTTON;
        return mdiCp;
    }
}

This small bit of code simply needs to be placed within your form class; It overrides a property that is already called when a form is initialised, so doesn’t need to be explicitly called.

Some before and after shots:

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