Visual Studio Tricks

#VS2010 has a bunch of new features around how to start, what do do with startup, and how to quickly launch the projects you usually are working on. Pinning, Deleting, Unpinning, and if you’re using Windows 7 – there is task bar pinning. This video will go over all of them.

#VS2010 has several enhancements in and around the Intellisense features. This short 3 minute video will walk you through using them, and specifically talking about camelCase filtering, intellisense with" “Suggest” vs. “Force” mode, and using undeclared types.

Over the last 24 months or so, I have joined a small group of folks who are passionate about sharing Visual Studio Tips and Tricks. I have now done talks, books, blogs, vlogs and classes around the world on better using Visual Studio. This year for TechEd North America I have done something special. I decided to pre-record and video blog my talk demos, slide by slide. And I’ll be releasing these series over the next week. So when my TechEd talk starts, all of the content will be online. Below is a list of the slides, and as I publish the video segment, I’ll move the slide above the “To be Published” double red line. Enjoy!

You can see the links in the slides – but they will not be made available until the video is released.

Press the keyboard chord [ALT]+[F3],[S] (bound to Edit.StopSearch) to stop a background search, also known as a Find in Files. You can also press the Stops a background Find toolbar button on the Find Results window.

Ever user [CTRL]+[SHIFT]+[F] and find too many results? Narrow your search scope, OR ... search within the results. Didn't know you could do that did you? This video shows you how.

You've probably noticed that doing a Find in Files returns all the hits in a Find Results tool window.  Did you know, you can use [F8] (with focus either in the Find Results window or in the editor) to navigate to the next result or [SHIFT]+[F8] to the previous result.  (Edit.GoToNextLocation and Edit.GoToPrevLocation) The video is pretty helpful for the visual – but this is a trick you’ll want to remember, I use it 100’s of times a day.

With the Find in Files window showing, you can change the Look In: combo box to anything except for open docs and current docs.  This will enable the Look at these file types: option to select what files to search for.

And yet another way of searching code (or any text really) in Visual Studio... it's called Find in Files.  It is the most comprehensive way to do a search. Even if you’re not looking for code, this can search any text string, in any set of files. We’re not talking about files linked in a project or solution, this is a disk search, say searching a directory and all child directories (or a group of directories).

The Find and Replace window is not a dialog, but actually a tool window. Thus you can dock it to the side if you find it in your way. Right-click on the tool window Titlebar and select Dockable. Now the tool window can be docked using a docking target. Additionally, you can go to Window menu and select...

Did you know that you can search in Visual Studio using wildcards and regular expressions (in addition to the regular text search) right from the Find and Replace window? This short tip/trick video shows you how.