Gerasko Aei Didaskomenos

Solon's original phrase was "Gerasko D' Aei Polla Didaskomenos", but here in Greece we use the shorter form, "Gerasko Aei Didaskomenos". I grow older forever learning new things.

It is never too late to learn something new. For example, just a few months ago I learned of the existence of the "??" operator in C#, after several years of using the language. Of course I had come across that operator in the reference, but it had not occurred to me how useful it would be in real-life scenarios. Then, one day I chanced upon someone else's code making use of it. There was a big 'aha!'.

So, today I learned one of the most useful things I know about Visual Studio.

Let us suppose for a moment that you are a real programmer, not a button-clicker that Microsoft thinks you are. So, when you double-click on a file in the Solution Explorer, what you want to see is the code, naturally. And this is what usually happens. But then one day you start programming Windows Forms, and suddenly double-clicking on some (but not all) of the files in your project does not show the code. Instead, Microsoft believes that what you must want to see in these cases, is, undoubtedly, their spiffy Windows Forms Designer. Because obviously, they think you must be a mindless button-clicker.

So, every time you double-click on a .cs file that happens to contain a form class, you are presented with a great big huge gotcha! as the designer appears before you instead of the code editor, and you are reminded, for the thousandth time, that double-clicking on a .cs file will do vastly different things, depending on what the class inside that .cs file derives from.

So, is there a way to convince Visual Studio to always show you the code instead of the designer when you double click on an item in solution explorer? In other words, is there any way to tell Visual Studio that you are a real programmer and not the button-clicker that Microsoft thinks you are?

It turns out that there is. I found it out today thanks to StackOverflow, (see here and here,) and it really made my day. In short, here it is:

The next time you want to open a .cs file, right-click on it and select "Open With..."; on the dialog that opens, select "CSharp Editor", and then click on the button which says "Set as Default". That's it, it will work forever after for all .cs files.

The only problem now is, that after a couple of years of Windows Forms Programming while being conditioned to always be careful to right-click on forms .cs files and select 'View Code', I have to first unlearn that before I can start double-clicking freely again.

Cheers!