 Hello, my name is Mads Christensen and I've been asked to show you how I use Visual Studio. So let's just jump right in and take a look and let's start with the tool windows that I have visible and here at the bottom, I have error list and I have the output window. I always have those two down there. Sometimes additional windows will get down there but I usually close them out when I'm done with them. And over on the right side, I dock test explorer, solution explorer and team explorer. And they're sitting over here always in this order so that I can very easily get to the things I need to do and I don't have too much clutter so I like to keep things a little bit neat and clean and here's an example of that. So let's say that I want to see the properties of a file so I'm going to hit F4 and my properties window I actually open next to my solution explorer and I do that because I don't use it that often and when I do, it's usually just to set a single property or two and then close it down again and so I don't want it to be like permanent anywhere. I like to have it right here and then I just close it out when I'm done with it and that's how I do that. So pretty nice and clean I'd say. I just have the standard toolbar up here with one addition is that I've added the manage extensions button right here so I have easy access to my extensions. So let's take a look at the options here. So one thing that I have done here is that I've removed some check boxes so if we look in or check marks rather, so if we zoom in here we can see that I don't want to reopen documents on solution load and I don't want to restore solution explorer hierarchy state on solution load. So those are actually checked by default and they have been for since forever. It's rather new that we have these two check boxes so that we can get rid of this default behavior and let me just show you what it is that these two settings help with. So let's just expand Visual Studio and open some documents here and I'm going to close the solution. So now I want to open the solution again and we're probably used to opening a solution and have Visual Studio automatically restore the state that we were in the last time we had the solution open. So let's just do that and we can see here that solution explorer does not keep the state. Nothing is expanded, everything is collapsed and it did not open those documents that were open before. So there's a couple of benefits to doing this. One is that it's faster so the time to solution open is reduced so I get a better performance out of it. But the main reason I do it is actually to keep things a little simpler and to reduce noise for myself. So it's really rare that I want to work on the same file the next time I open the solution and I usually don't want to have the folders open and multiple projects open to the exact same state the next time I work on the project which could be the next day or the next month or even the next year. So for me that's just adds a lot of sense to keep things clean this way. I use a lot of extensions too. Let's take a look. So I'm going to open the extension manager and I got a whole bunch here. All sorts of things, too much stuff to go through. Some of them are small, some of them are bigger. Let me give you an example of a small extension. I'm going to zoom in here. Sometimes you zoom in you're going to show your colleagues or whatever what's on your screen you zoom in to better so that everyone can better see but now you want to get back to a hundred percent and so you can try to control and then mouse wheel in and out until you hit a hundred percent which can be hard to hit sometimes. So I have an extension that just resets my zoom level so control zero zero puts everything back to a hundred percent or whatever my default is. So I can set my default to be a hundred percent or to be a hundred ten percent which is what some people do. Not really a big thing but it's just something I've come to rely on and that's an example of a small little feature. Another one that I use actually quite frequently both when I do web development ASP.net and so on and also when I write custom Visual Studio Extensions is the ability to optimize and compress image files so they take up as little space sorry a little weight as possible. And so I have an extension called Image Optimizer and that extension allows me to right click any folder or project or solution what I'm doing here and I can then optimize for best quality or for best compression. So best quality means it will optimize a little bit so you can't there's going to be no difference in the quality of the images they're going to look the same to the human eye. The next one here is for best compression which compresses much much harder so it makes the files a lot smaller on disk not the dimensions like width and height they stay the same just on disk and there could be a visible difference like you could see the quality go down a little bit but usually not and so this is actually the one I always use I optimize for best compression. So if I click that some processes kick in all run in the background on break background threats I can see exactly what happened and I've reduced the size of my images between you know 3 percent and 11 percent so that's that's quite a lot to do just from a right click and these are images that I already optimized once before but recently I updated the algorithm to compress even better and so I was able to squeeze more out of these images. So that's my setup I hope this was interesting to some of you thanks for watching.