Beta 2 of Visual Studio .NET 2005 has introduced a problem that prevents CodeRush from showing its menu entries. A workaround for the Options dialog has been published, which involves binding the command to call the dialog to a keyboard shortcut. One thing that’s not that easy to do is showing the CodeRush tool windows, like the CodeRush Guide, the Messages window, or the tool windows of 3rd party plugins like the CodeRush Documentor. To work around this, I have created a plugin called CR_OpenToolWindow. Here’s the download link for version 1.0: CR_OpenToolWindow-1.0.zip.

To install, just unzip and drop the file into the DXCore Plugin directory, which by default is at C:\Program Files\Developer Express Inc\DXCore for Visual Studio .NET\1.1\Bin\Plugins. To use the plugin, you can bind one or more keyboard shortcuts to the two commands it exposes. The first command is called ShowToolWindows (I have bound this to [[Ctrl]] + [[Shift]] + [[Alt]] + [[T]]) and shows the following dialog:

showtoolwindows.png

The other command is called ToggleToolWindow and you need to configure it to receive a parameter. For example, to use the command to toggle the Documentor tool window and bind it to the shortcut [[Ctrl]] + [[Shift]] + [[Alt]] + [[D]], the configuration in the CodeRush Options dialog would have to look like this:

toggledocumentor.png

Note the text that’s marked red: that’s the title of the tool window as shown in the window above. You can bind multiple “instances” of the command to multiple shortcuts to toggle different tool windows. That’s it, have fun!