Title: Create a Visual Studio tool

This example shows how to create a Visual Studio tool that lets you easily open a web page or send an email.

There are many web sites that you may find useful while building applications. You may also want to send email to an instructor, me (Rod Stephens), other project members, and others. This example shows how to make tools to launch these processes from the Visual Studio IDE.

To make a tool that opens a web page, follow these steps:

1. Open the Tools menu and select External Tools.
2. Click Add.
3. Give the new tool the title C# Helper.
4. Set the tool's Command to the location of your browser's executable. To find the browser's location:
   1. Right-click an icon that launches the browser and select Properties.
   2. Copy and paste the Target. This might be something like "C:\Program Files\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe" or "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe".
5. Set the tool's Arguments to the URL http://www.CSharpHelper.com.
6. Click OK.

The tool will appear in the Tools menu in the section above the External Tools entry. When you select that menu item, Visual Studio will launch your browser and display the web page.

To launch an email, follow the previous steps but change the URL in the tool's Arguments property to something like mailto:RodStephens@CSharpHelper.com.