On Visual Studio 2010

There are millions of tips and tricks for Visual Studio. Most could be useful, but I’ll never get around to using them more than once. Every developer has a few favourite short-cuts. 

 Here are 6 quick things that I use every day when programming. 

1. Debugger Display:

No more stepping through, hovering over a collection of items and drilling down and down further trying to see if the one object you want has been returned. The code:

above your class or enum, etc.

And when you’re debugging, you get a nice little view of what’s happening. On hover:

2. Ctrl-G: Go to line.

3. Conditional breakpoints: Right click on a breakpoint and select ‘Condition’, and Visual Studio will only break on the given condition.

The cool thing about conditional breakpoints is that you can actually execute a line of code: 

Set ‘title = “I’m in your computer, changing your strings!”’, and your variable title is now assigned this string.

4. Ctrl-I: incremental search. Hold it down to cycle through occurrences in the same file. One thing I noticed: it’s only case sensitive if you use upper-case in your search term.

If you have ReSharper, I love these:

5. ReSharper short-cut Ctrl-Alt-M: Extracts a complicated code fragment into a method. 

6. ReSharper short-cut Ctrl-T or Ctrl-N: Find Type. 

*Thanks @unrepentantgeek for his ‘Working Smarter not Harder with Visual Studio’ talk at the Wellington .NET User Group.