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Creating a bug repro viewer in 5 minutes

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One of my favorite books of all time is The Pragmatic Programmer.  A piece of advice I've always taken to heart is to take the time to make tools that will make you more productive. 

Today's tool I can share with you - I didn't want to flip back and forth between the repro steps in my bug reporting program and the program I was trying to fix. 

So I created a TopMost window that will always be there so I can see what the next step is. 

  • Open Visual Studio 2008 or 2005, create a new Windows Forms application.
  • Select the Form in the designer
  • Open the Property Grid and find the TopMost property.  Set TopMost=true.
  • Drag and drop a RichTextBox from the toolbox
  • Select "Dock in parent container" from the designer action panel, or go to the property grid and choose Dock=Fill
  • F5 to run the application
  • Paste in repro steps from the bug! 
    • (Tip - if the steps are in HTML, you may want to paste into word first, then the rich text box to get better formatting).

 And voila!

  • Quick and simple repro-step viewer that stays on top of all applications.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    October 09, 2009
    Other options :
  • use a text editor with always-on-top functionality (for example notepad++ - this is very useful also for code collage :))
  • use a tool like powermenu which can make any window always on top