C# Tutorial - Setting Environment Options
The Options dialog box enables you to configure the integrated development environment (IDE) to your needs. There are a plethora of options available, way too many to discuss them all here, so this is a brief overview of how to use the options dialog.
To open the Options dialog, select Options… from the Tools menu. The next figure shows the Options dialog when it is first opened. As you can see, it is divided into two parts: a navigation pane on the left and a display area on the right. The tree control in the navigation pane includes the folder nodes, Environment, Text Editor and Debugging. Expand any folder node to list the pages of options that it contains. When you select the node for a particular page, its options appear in the display area.
Below the navigation pane is a checkbox labelled "Show all settings". By ticking this box, a full list of all of the options is made available to you. Three new folder nodes appear in the navigation pane, Projects and Solutions, Database Tools and Windows Forms Designer.
Clicking OK in the Options dialog box saves all settings on all pages. Clicking Cancel on any page cancels all change requests, including any just made on other Options pages. Some changes to option settings, such as those made on Fonts and Colors, Environment, Options Dialog Box, will only take effect after you close and reopen Visual Studio.
Setting Tabs
One of the first things to set up is an individuals preference for the size of tabs. That is to say, how many spaces represent the whitespace when you hit the tab key. My preference is to use two spaces to represent a tab, and to insert spaces instead of a tab. This is easily set up in the options.
Expand the Text Editor node in the navigation pane. Now expand the All Languages node and click on the Tabs node. The Options dialog should now display the Tabs options. To set the options as I require them, select the following properties:
| Property | Value |
| Indenting | Smart |
| Tab size | 2 |
| Indent size | 2 |
| Insert spaces | Selected |
These selections can be seen in the previous figure and allow code to be written in the style I like. Browse through the options to see what can be set up to help your programming experience be that little bit simpler.
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