How many times have you had a project (or solution) in Visual Studio’s MRU list that you didn’t want? Maybe it was a project you opened by mistake, or maybe it was something you only needed in rare circumstances. Whatever the reason, did you also try looking for an option in Visual Studio that would allow you to delete those MRU entries? I’ve been in the same situation and, unfortunately, I had no luck finding a way to delete a specific entry in the list. At least, not directly through Visual Studio.

In this post I’ll show you a hack that will allow specific entries to be deleted. It requires a few registry modifications and isn’t the cleanest solution, but at least it gets the job done. If you know of another way to do this directly through Visual Studio then, by all means, please leave a comment.

The first thing you’ll need to do is open one of the following registry keys:

• Visual Studio Express for C++: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VCExpress\9.0\ProjectMRUList
• Visual Studio Express for C#: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VCSExpress\9.0\ProjectMRUList
• Visual Studio Professional: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\ProjectMRUList

It will look something similar to this:

Here you’ll see paths to each of your MRU projects. The entry which appears first in Visual Studio’s list is labeled “File1,” the second is “File2,” etc. Simply delete whichever entry holds the path to the project you don’t want. If you’re deleting the last entry, you can stop here. Otherwise, you’ll have to rename all successive entries such that the numbering is consecutive.

Once you’ve deleted the entry or entries representing your project(s), open a new instance of Visual Studio – notice how the MRU list just got shorter! 😉

-Greg Dolley

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What didn’t you know car chargers (i.e. iPod car charger, cell phone car charger, etc.)? Simple: you don’t need them! Yup, that’s right – don’t ever buy a “car” version of a charger for a device that comes with a regular wall A/C adapter. How come?

With a car charger you can only charge one device at a time and only the device it was made for. What if you could charge anything in your car with a device’s regular A/C adapter? Not only that, what if you could charge more than one device at a time?

There’s an easy way to do this: instead of buying a car charger, buy a DC/AC Inverter for your car! What this device does is convert your cigarette lighter socket into a standard wall outlet. Then you can plug the regular A/C adapter into the inverter – as if it was a wall in your house! Also, the cheapest inverters come with two outlets (others have four, six, etc.), so you can charge more than one device at a time.

Best of all, an inverter costs only about $25 dollars, not those rip-off prices you see for typical car chargers ($60 – $120 dollars). Since most people have no clue that an inverter will do the same thing, the OEM’s know they can charge more.

I’ve been using the same inverter for about a year and it works great! It has even survived amazingly hot summer temperatures when my car has been parked under the sun for an extended period (my car’s cabin thermometer would typically read 145 – 175 degrees). That’s what I call durability!

I’d recommend buying an inverter with a power rating of 150 watts. It’s probably more than you’ll ever need. You can charge a high powered laptop, cell phone, and a few other small devices all at the same time with that amount of power. Most laptops need 75 watts, but high powered one’s could require 90 or 120 watts. iPods, PDA’s and other small devices use almost nothing – about five watts max.

You can buy an inverter at any electronics store. I got mine at Fry’s Electronics, but Circuit City and Best Buy should have them too.

-Greg Dolley

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