The Hidden Well – aka Tweaking the Visual Studio 2010 Pro Power Tools Document Well via hidden registry tweaks

The Visual Studio Blog - Document Well 2010 Plus: Hidden Options

“A couple of posts ago I announced the availability of Document Well 2010 Plus as part of the Visual Studio 2010 Pro Power Tools. Since then we have received lots of feedback about our extension, for which I am very grateful. User feedback has centered around two main points:

1. There should be an option to hide the pin tab
2. When using custom colors for tabs, the selected tab is sometimes not clearly distinguishable

Fortunately, the extension has a couple of hidden options that will let you alleviate these two points, as well as others that hopefully will help you in your daily work. During development of the extension we experimented internally with many different options for the features available in the extension. For the first release it was decided that exposing all options could be confusing and overwhelming to our users, and so the options dialog UI was simplified. You will find here all options that were hidden due to this simplification. I encourage you to try them out and let us know if you find them useful or not.

• Pinned Tabs Options
  • Pin button visible in unpinned tabs
  • Maintain pinned status if document is removed from document well
  • Pinned tabs appear in original order
• Tab Panel Position
  • Tabs on bottom of document well
  • Tabs on right of document well
• Color Options
  • Use custom color for selected tab
  • Use gradients for custom colors
    • Custom color fades to default tab color
    • Custom color fades to more intense tab color
    • Custom color fades to less intense tab color
  • Regular expression colors have precedence over project colors

…

…”

I do this too… Making stuff optional/configurable, yet having those same configuration settings hidden from the user. Sometimes it’s for simplicity, sometimes to keep the users safe from themselves and sometimes because I’ve learned  that “will never change” really means “will certainly change before the next release”.

The hard thing is drawing the line between “configurable” and “over-engineered”… lol

 

Related Past Post XRef:
“Visual Studio 2010 Pro Power Tools” available on the Visual Studio Gallery and free for everyone (VS 2010 Pro and above though). Think “Monster rollaway filled with cool power tools”