Month: February 2012

It’s time for an old favorite from the Visual Studio 2005 days… Remember How to search using the Ctrl+D Window from one of the earlier tips?  Now let’s have a little more fun… Press Ctrl+D to go to the Find Combo Box and then… Goto a line – type the line number and press Ctrl+G…

To create an alias, open up the Command Window (or anywhere you can type in VS commands) and type in something along the lines of alias GobblesGobblesGobbles help.about and now running GobblesGobblesGobbles from the VS command window will pop up the Help About menu.  I will award bonus points if you can figure out the…

The command Tools.Shell will run an external executable out of process from VS.  To run, it is basically Shell <executable> But of course, we got optional arguments… Shell [/commandwindow] [/dir:folder] [/outputwindow] <executable> [/args] /commandwindow (or /c) – to display the executable’s output in the command window /outputwindow (or /o) – to display the executable’s output…

You can record your command window session via the log command.  Just run log -on <filename> and start recording.  To finish logging, it’s just log -off There is also an option to overwrite the existing file; otherwise it will append.  Note that both dash and forward slash will work for command arguments. 

After the past several weeks of Find tips (i knew i would have a few tips, just not nearly a month’s worth!), let’s change things up a bit and talk about the command window. Press Ctrl+Alt+A to open the command window.  Check the keybinding for View.CommandWindow if your keybindings are different.  Also available from the…

The results of a Find Symbol or a Quick Find Symbol will appear in the Find Symbol results.  Similar to the Find Results window (when searching for text), you can press Ctrl+Alt+F12 to bring up the Find Symbols Results window (View.FindSymbolResults) press F8 (Edit.GoToNextLocation) to navigate to the next result, and Shift+F8 (Edit.GoToPreviousLocation) to navigate…

Similar to yesterday’s tip on Find Symbol… select a word in the editor you want to do a Find Symbol on, then press Shift+Alt+F12.  No Find Symbol window will appear.  It is bound to Edit.QuickFindSymbol. The Quick Find Symbol uses the same customizations on the Find Symbol Window.  So, if you need to change scope…

Another search tip/trick or command is Symbol Search. This is much different than a string search. Watch this short video to learn about the built in Symbol Search in Visual Studio Edit.FindSymbol is also bound to [Alt]+[F12]. You can search within your current solution (including or excluding references), or even within the .NET Framework.