I’m very excited that Silverlight 2 has been released. I’m too new to Microsoft to claim even the slightest involvement, but it’s wonderful to see the excitement both within Microsoft as outside.
It will be interesting to see what will happen with the (already great) uptake of Silverlight by the market.

As I am spending most of my days knee-deep in Xaml nowadays, I always try to find things that will help me be more productive. It happens quite often that I want to select a complete xaml tag. It’s way too much effort to use the mouse to select it, so I often use the control-m-m shortcut to collapse a tag and then select it. However, a few days ago I took 5 minutes to automate this.

When you put your mouse somewhere in the Grid tag, and use my macro, you end up with this:

You can even put your mouse in the endtag. I bound it to Control-Q and it has made my life that much better!

The macro is as simple as this:

    Sub SelectXMLTagContents()

        DTE.ActiveDocument.Selection.StartOfLine(VsStartOfLineOptions.VsStartOfLineOptionsFirstColumn)

        DTE.ExecuteCommand("Edit.ToggleOutliningExpansion")

        DTE.ActiveDocument.Selection.StartOfLine(VsStartOfLineOptions.VsStartOfLineOptionsFirstColumn)

        DTE.ActiveDocument.Selection.EndOfLine(True)

        DTE.ExecuteCommand("Edit.ToggleOutliningExpansion")

    End Sub

It collapses a tag, jumps to the first column, selects the line and then does an uncollapse.

For those using a tool like Karl’s ‘Xaml Power Toys’, it might also be a worthwile addition to their shortcuts.