Visual Studio Column Guides Redux
I was just informed by one of my colleagues that there is a hidden feature in Visual Studio to add guidelines into the text editor. Guidelines are virtical dotted lines that show character column boundaries. This is useful if you are formatting something to fit in 80 or 120 characters. Not that this is something that I encourage. We're in the 2000's for goodness sake; everyone should gather all those old monitors and video cards and plug them into their PC and start using multiple monitors immediately. But, keeping an eye on line length isn't a bad idea, as code gets a bit hard to parse if you have to start horizontally scrolling. I set my guide at 120 characters because that is what I set my console window width to these days. Here's the undocumented registry setting, and here's Sara Ford's original blog entry. You can add multiple columns separated by comma's.
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0\Text Editor]
"Guides"="RGB(196,196,196) 120"