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If you work on a solution that requires multiple startup projects, you can change that in Visual Studio:

One catch though is that sometimes Visual Studio will switch the Startup project to whatever project you select in Solution Explorer (work on one of its files).

If this happens to you, just select one of the projects as a Startup Project.

This seems to "stop" the automatic Startup Project "Feature" from Visual Studio. Click File -> Save All Files to ensure it’s saved, or even restart Visual Studio.

Of course you’ll need to set the multiple startup projects again after that.

Reference

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4434/can-i-configure-visual-studio-not-to-change-startup-project-everytime-i-open-a-f

It’s been quite sometime since I first installed VS 11 (soon after dev preview came way), so, I thought I’d share my experience around using it as primary IDE (with VS 2010 solutions most of the time):

• It works nicely with Visual Studio 2010 solutions, even big real-world ones. It doesn’t convert them but does some changes to project files which are backwards compatible (mainly minor formatting changes). Note that from the source-control point of view, those are still changes.
  • Somehow all my IIS 7.5 application pools lost their "Enable 32-bit applications" option very shortly after that. This is too coincidental with Visual Studio 11, although I’m not 100% sure if it was the reason.
    It could be hard to debug, If you start getting errors like "unable to load assembly <some path>.dll. or one of its dependencies. An attempt was made to load a program with an incorrect format.". Check for that option.
• It works a bit faster than Visual Studio 2010. Maybe because it has fewer plug-ins, but I think if I remember bare-bones Visual Studio 2010 correctly, this Visual Studio 11 one is still (slightly) faster.

Just a quick note, if you install Productivity Power Tools For Visual Studio 2010.

It has a nice feature.. Copy code as html. The feature doesn’t add any new menu option or whatever, simply when you copy the code the usual CTRL+C or Edit -> Copy way in Visual Studio, and paste it in a text-only editor like Notepad, it’ll be treated as text normally, but if you paste it in an HTML capable editor like Microsoft Word, it’ll be paste as HTML.

Note

If you already know what the feature is, and have a problem with Live Writer 2011 or similar version, you can skip to the title that mentions it.

• If you wonder how  made this rectangular selection, you can do it by pressing ALT before selection and holding as you move the mouse to continue to select
• If you wonder why, simply to avoid the spaces on the left in the pasted code

If I paste this in notepad, nothing new!

But if I paste in Word 2010 (Outlook is the same)

(it can be better if play with font size and text wrapping options)

This is particularly helpful when you want to copy colour settings / Visual Studio theme from one machine to another or across different versions of VS you have (say at your laptop and some customer’s PC)

Simply get the VS2010 import file, right click, open with, choose a program, and pick any simple editor, say Notepad

Yeah, you got it, what you need is to change:

<UserSettings>
    <ApplicationIdentity version="10.0"/>

To

<UserSettings>
    <ApplicationIdentity version="9.0"/>

Now you can use that in VS2008 Without any problem…

Intro…

Last week I had to re-install Windows. I haven’t done it in a while, so, had to remember all those “1 time” tips I do after reinstall. For example, downloading SQL Server Developer Edition before Visual Studio to get the full Management Studio. Another example, setting Visual Studio to pin to the Start menu, and configuring it for UAC.

The Problem

In the very first year of Windows 7, I used to have many problems with UAC on and always disabled it, later, things started to get better and it became my normal config to leave it on. One problem that remained is that if you have a program set to always “Run AS Administrator”, if this program has associated files (can open files with certain extensions if you click the files), you no longer can open those files directly.

So, like many, I do pin visual studio to the Start menu

I also need to set it to “Run As Administrator” in so many times (for stuff with built-in IIS, not much is on IIS Express).

I right click the shortcut, go to “Compatibility” tab, and check “Run this program as an administrator”.