The Start Page provides a way to quickly open recent projects, links to information about how to get started, and the RSS feed. Technically, the Start Page is a tool window, so it is possible to dock it, float it on a secondary monitor, and so forth. But I’ve always seen it used in the center of the IDE. This is probably why I’ve always seen it documented internally as its own stand-alone feature, so I didn’t see a need to change tradition.
This section covers the tweaks you can make to the Start Page, including how to change the default RSS feed and how to prevent it from showing whenever you launch Visual Studio.
Go to Tools–Options–Environment–Startup and in the Start Page News Channel text box, you can change the current RSS feed to the desired RSS feed.
You can also update the time in minutes to pull content from the feed. Note that once you click OK on the Tools–Options dialog box, the RSS content will be pulled automatically.
If you want to read the "Tip of the Day" series from your Start Page, here’s the RSS feed to use:
http://blogs.msdn.com/saraford/rss_tag_Visual+Studio+2008+Tip+of+the+Day.xml
Sara Aside
When I was working on either my test cases or the automation framework, I would use the Last Loaded Solution option. When I was doing ad hoc testing, just randomly testing for bugs, I would have either the Show Empty Environment or Show New Project Dialog Box option set.
Under Tools–Options–Environment–Startup, you’ll find the At Startup combo box.
Following is a list of the items you can select to specify what you want Visual Studio to open to:
Your Web browser home page. Note that the option to change your Web browser home page is found in Tools–Options–Environment–Web Browser.
The last loaded solution.
The Open Project dialog box.
The New Project dialog box.
Show Empty Environment. Choosing this option results in Visual Studio showing an empty environment without a document.
The Start Page. This is the default setting.
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