Introduction

For anyone doing .NET development knows that Visual Studio is hands down the best IDE that we can get. but the problem is it’s such a massive tool that most developers hardly scratch the surface when it comes to its capabilities.

So here i have listed some of the tips/tricks that i think would be helpful for the developers.

Quick Launch

• Allows you to navigate to any feature by just typing it in.
• Located upper right hand corner of the IDE or you can always just press Ctrl+Q.

For example:

• If you want to enable or disable line number usually we will go to Tools-> Options -> Text editor -> General
• Using Quick Launch you can just type in line number and you will possible options that you can navigate to

This saves us lot of time by avoiding to go through each menus to find some options.

Navigate To Window

• You can get to this by Ctrl+,
• This is similar to quick launch but instead of finding something within visual studio itself you are going to look for something within codebase.

Note: If you are using Resharper it also has a similar feature.

Peek feature

• When we press F12 on a method call Visual Studio will take us to the class file in which the method has been defined. This is great for navigation.
• VS2012 has simplified this further by when pressing Alt+F12 instead of taking us to the target file it brings the method code to the current file which you can edit and save if you need.
• For example in below snapshot you can see HomeController.cs is a class file which calls the SomeMethod() in TraningsController class which is in a file called TraningsController.cs.
• When pressing Alt+F12 visual studio brings the definition of the method to the HomeController itself and allows you to make a change.

This will also support nested peek if method SomeMethod calls another method you can go to that method by pressing Alt+F12 in the minimum window.

Debugging

• This is most commonly used trick. While debugging Visual Studio will allows us to skip through some code if drag the debug pointer up and down.
• We can also use this  feature to debug some reapeatedly without having to restart the application

Paste Special

• At some point of time in every project we will need to convert an json or xml content as serializable classes.
• Usally developers will use some kind of tools like xsd.exe to generate C# classes from xml files etc.
• Visual studio has this feature inbuilt so we dont have to need any extra tools.

Lets consider we have a json text like below

• Just copy the content Go to Edit -> Paste Special -> Paste json as Classes. You will get the code for classes as shown below

Find file in solution explorer

If you want to locate the current file in solution explorer it could be a daunting task to manually exploring the solution explorer especially if you’re project is large. To do this quickly just press Ctrl+[+S

Bookmarks

We can use bookmarks to mark lines in our code so that we can quickly return to a specific location and jump back and forth between locations.

• To create a bookmark press Ctrl+K, Ctrl+K
• To go to next bookmark press Ctrl+K, Ctrl+N
• To go to previous bookmark press Ctrl+K,Ctrl+P
• To View all bookmarks press Ctrl+K, Ctrl+W or go to View=>Bookmarks window