Visual studio 2017 - Tips & Tricks

Editor's Notes

• #4: Go To Line (Ctrl +G) – quickly jump to a different line in your current document Go To All (Ctrl + ,) or (Ctrl + T) – similar to old Navigate To experience, search results include everything below Go To File (Ctrl 1, F) – search for files in your solution Go To Type (Ctrl 1, T) – search results include: Classes, Structs, Enums Interfaces & Delegates (managed code only) Go To Member (Ctrl 1, M) – search results include: Global variables and global functions Class member variables and member functions Constants Enum Items Properties and Events Go To Symbol (Ctrl 1, S) – search results include: Results from Go To Types and Go To Members All remaining C++ language constructs, including macros
• #10: If there is one feature that no one uses and everyone should use, it's Quick Launch. Someone told me the internal telemetry numbers show that usage of Quick Launch in the single digits or lower. Do you know that you (we) are constantly digging around in the menus for stuff? Most of you use the mouse and go Tools...Options...and stare. Just press Ctrl+Q and type. Need to change the Font Size?
• #11: I love showing people features that totally surprise them. Like "I had NO IDEA that was there" type features. Try "map mode" in the Quick Launch and turn it on...then check out your scroll bar in a large file. Your scrollbar will turn into a thumbnail that you can hover over and use to navigate your file! An additional trick with the map mode, is when you hover over the preview what it shows depends on where you hover.The closer the cursor is to the actual code, the more detail you see.If the cursor is all the way on the right you just see an overview of the nesting.
• #13: "pinned tabs" and "preview tabs“ If you pin useful tabs, just like in your browser those tabs will stay to the left and stay open. You can not just "close all" and "close all but this" on a right click, but you can also "close all but pinned." Additionally, you don't always have to double-click in the Solution Explorer to see what's in a file. That just creates a new tab that you're likely going to close anyway. Try just single clicking, or better yet, use your keyboard. You'll get a preview tab on the far right side. You'll never have more than one and preview tabs won't litter your tab list...unless you promote them. Show pinned tabs in a separate row
• #14: MOVE LINES WITH YOUR KEYBOARD Yes I realize that Visual Studio isn't Emacs or VIM (unless you want it to be VsVim) but it does have a few tiny tricks that most VS users don't use. You can move lines just by pressing Alt-up/down arrows. I've never seen anyone do this in the wild but me. You can also Shift-Select a bunch of lines and then Alt-Arrow them around as a group. You can also do Square Selection with Alt and Drag...and drag yourself a nice rectangle...then start typing to type on a dozen lines at once. If you prefer to only use the keyboard, you can perform the Alt-Drag editing feature by holding down Alt-Shift and using the arrow keys CTRL+W to select the current word   Ctrl+F12 to take you to the implementation is a sanity saver.
• #17: https://www.slideshare.net/AlexThissen/visual-studio-productivity-tips
• #18: https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/6027/Tips-and-Tricks-for-the-Visual-Studio-NET-IDE
• #19: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/visualstudio/2017/06/26/7-lesser-known-hacks-for-debugging-in-visual-studio/ https://abhijitjana.net/2015/06/05/25-productivity-and-debugging-tips-for-visual-studio/