Bing Start Page

The Bing custom Start Page for Visual Studio is a sample start page that I implemented to discuss some of the aspects of building start pages in my blog:http://blogs.msdn.com/pedrosilva/archive/2010/05/05/creating-custom-startpage-extensions.aspx.

This Start Page adds a new Bing tab to the original VS Start Page. The Bing tab displays the image of the day from the website, and a search textbox that you can use to type your search query. Pressing enter in the search box or clicking the search button launches the user’s query.

You can either decide to launch the search query in the VS internal browser or in the user’s default web browser. (Shows how you can use configuration settings from the Start Page)

Bing Start Page – Installation Instructions

The following steps describe how to switch from the default Start Page to the Bing Start Page.

1.    On the Tools menu, clickOptions.

2.    On the left side of the Options dialog box, expand theEnvironment node, and then clickStartup.

3.    In the CustomizeStart Page list, select ‘[Installed Extension] Bing Start Page’

4.    Click OK.

Bing Start Page Features:

• Display current image from Bing search page. [v 0.5]
• Do Bing search from within the start page. [v 0.5]
• Show search results either in VS embedded browser or user's default browser. [v 0.5]
• Save/delete/show your favorite images from Bing locally, so that they're accessible later. [v 1.0]
• Imagelist of all the images you've saved. [v 1.0]
• Save and show copyright information with the displayed image. [v 1.0]

Troubleshooting

If you encounter issues with loading Visual Studio with this Start Page, you can start Visual Studio in safe mode by typing the following at the Visual Studio Command prompt.

Devenv /SafeMode

This prevents the bad Start Page from loading. You can then return to theOptions dialog box and reset Visual Studio to use the default Start Page.