Visual Studio Tip / Trick #503 English Transcription:

Today’s Visual studio trick of the day trick No. 503 is block select. Now there is some new stuff that we have in Visual Studio 2010. So if you are not familiar with block select here is the idea. With the normal drag and drop of your mouse of even using the keyboard [SHIFT]+[DOWN] you get a line select so it actually selects all of your text. If you prefix either one of those actions with the [ALT] key so holding down your [ALT] key and then doing a drag and drop you can do a block select. That was actually true in Visual Studio 2005, 2008 and 2010. The same thing is true with [ALT] key with a arrow so [ALT]+[SHIFT],[DOWN] you can see that we can do the same block select with the keyboard. So here what’s new in Visual Studio 2010. Typing lets say we wanted to not only block select but we actually wanted to replace that, so lets just type in ‘Replace’ there and you will see that all of those attributes were replaced appropriately. Now it doesn’t work in this case very well for us because it’s an XML note that we are editing but we do have the ability to block replace now. So my [CTRL]+[X] to cut and [CTRL]+[V] to paste works as we’d expected now again its new in 2010. In 2008 you can do a block select but you could not type to replace on multiple lines, that’s something brand new and exciting Visual Studio 2010. We’ll see you on the next trick.