Useful Visual Studio Plugin

On surfing around the net the other day looking for a replacement to Visual Studio 2003’s clipboard monitor I stumbled across this excellent Clipboard manager plug-in for Visual Studio 2005. As his blog was offline at the time I wasn’t sure exactly how to use it but now I’ve had a play I’m not sure I’ll be able to do without it!

Check out the Clipboard Manager plug-in at
http://www.csharper.net/blog/clipboard_manager_upgraded_to_package.aspx

For those of you interested, the plug-in monitors the clipboard activity allowing you to resurrect previous clipboards and make them current and even locking items so you can use them at a later date. I’ve found it incredibly useful when testing sites as it allows me to keep common messages on the clip. Downside is you have to have Visual Studio open at the time so I’ll have to look into a standalone version.

Here are a few shots of it in “action”:

Visual Studio Clipboard Manager Plugin

The items that have been added to the clipboard in the past show up in the list at the top and there's a small preview window below (which I think you can select parts out of). You can also remove all items from the history by clicking the icon in the top left.

Visual Studio Clipboard Manager Plugin

To re-select an old item double click it and it's instantly the main item! The currently selected item is the one in black text with a green arrow next to it.

Visual Studio Clipboard Manager Plugin

The context menu offers a number of extra options including the ability to lock and unlock an item, this means when you restart your computer the item is still in the history -great if you have common items such as test credit card numbers! If you want to remove a single item from the history, you can do that using the context menu too. I've not yet used the "Save to File" or "Search Online" items.

Update: There does seem to be some sort of glitch with it, I think my history has got corrupt at somepoint so when I clear all the unlocked items new items weren’t getting caught anymore. I've found two solutions: The first is to restart Visual Studio, the other is to unlock all items and clear the history completely. This seemed to sort it. I did also note that I had one blank item at the top of the list so I guess that's what was causing it.

Author

Tim

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