In this post I will share with you one of the development environment practices that I use and find quite helpful. Few years ago I was browsing through windows “Sounds” tab for some irrelevant obscure reason and stumbled into option of setting Visual Studio sounds. You see, incidentally, both Visual Studio and MS Windows are Microsoft’s products – and this fact opens a room for integration features between these products that one wouldn’t normally expect.
There are 4 Visual Studio sounds that can be added, as the screenshot to the right shows; most useful are build completion sounds. At my work, during course of the day, I find myself compiling the project at least dozen times. Since the compilation is a process which can take up to several minutes, depending on size of the project, sitting and just staring at the build progress icon becomes boring after a while. Configuring sound to be played at the end of the build allows you to turn your attentions to other topics until you hear the callback – in compliance with traditions of asynchronous programming. After extensive research, most fitting sounds were named “work complete” and “Houston, we have a problem”.
The following feature was tested for VS2008, but the chances are that such useful feature wasn’t removed in following release of Visual Studio. One last hint, after you set sounds, you will need to restart Visual Studio for the changes to take effect.
Try it, and see the quality of your life finally soaring.