Sara Ford's Weblog

The Visual Studio shell is a big place.  I should know, since I used Visual J++ everyday for a year before joining the team.  As I write these tips, I try to think back to my J++ days to come up with a list of tips and tricks I wish I had known...

Press Ctrl+T to transpose a character Press Ctrl+Shift+T to transpose a word Press Alt+Shift+T to transpose a line In the above example (where the cursor is placed before the "is" on the commented line "now is the time"), Pressing...

The Ctrl+D Window is another way of doing a Quick Find with the scope limited to the current document.  Press Ctrl+D to reach the Find Combo Window.  Now, type whatever search string and press Enter to do a forward search or Shift + Enter to...

Ever been typing in the editor, and for whatever reason, the text isn’t indented properly on the line?  Instead of manually pressing backspace or tab for each line of text, just press Ctrl+K, Ctrl+D , which does a Format Document. For larger files...

Docking targets are hands-down my all-time favorite feature that I tested back in my VS Environment days.  Oh, the fun I would have opening bugs like, "Tool Window client area resizes to a negative size after redocking to same location 100+...

Today’s tip is mutually exclusive to yesterday’s word wrap tip , meaning try as you might, you won’t be able to enabled both word wrap and virtual space.  But if you figure out a way to do it, please send me mail.  =) Note: in the picture above...

There are four commands that involve converting spaces to tabs and tabs to spaces. Edit – Advanced – Tabify Selected Lines – Replaces the leading whitespace on a line that contains the selection with tabs.  Edit – Advanced – Untabify Selected Lines...

Not one of my finer tip of the day titles, but it illustrates the point.  =) With either a single line or several lines selected, you can either use the Increase Indent or Decrease Indent toolbar button found on the text editor toolbar, or from Edit...

Visual Studio has four window layouts: Design view – what you see when you launch Visual Studio Full screen – View – Full Screen Debugging view – when debugging File view – when you run “devenv.exe foo.txt” But today’s tip focuses on Full Screen. ...

On the Edit – Advanced menu, you’ll find the Delete Horizontal White Space (interesting, i thought whitespace was one word) command bound to Ctrl+K, Ctrl+\ . To use, put the cursor anywhere in the whitespace that precedes the line, and press Ctrl+K, Ctrl...

Yellow – you’ve edited these lines since your last save.  Yellow becomes Green upon saving. Green – the lines you’ve edited before your last save.  Save again and Green disappears. Not seeing it?  Go to Tools – Options Dialog, and on the...

Go to Tools - Options Dialog , and under Text Editor – All Languages – General, check the Word Wrap option.  When checked, you’ll have the option to show visual glyphs for word wrap . You can also customize the foreground color of the visual glyph...

And yet another one of those, wow, i didn’t know you could do that, until someone shows you, is you can "maximize" a tool window within Visual Studio by selecting "Tabbed Document."  With your desired tool window selected, either...

Ah, it really is the simple things in life, isn’t it? Use Ctrl+K, Ctrl+C to comment code and Ctrl+K, Ctrl+U to uncomment code.  All the default settings, including the General Development Settings, Visual Basic, C#, and C++ have these commands bound...

Press Ctrl+Shift+U to make the current character or selected characters uppercase Press Ctrl+U to make the current character or selected characters lowercase I got to be honest here and say I had to ask around when these commands would be useful. ...

In the previous tip , I introduced the Ctrl+D Window and how it does a Quick Find in the current document.  Today’s tip focuses on how to customize your Ctrl+D search experience. Press Ctrl+F to bring up the Quick Find tool window.  Then you...

In the above picture, note the location of the cursor in the middle of the current line.  Pressing Ctrl+Enter will insert a blank line above the current line and Ctrl+Shift+Enter will insert a blank line below the current line.  The cursor will...

You may have noticed that within tool windows like Solution Explorer, you cannot reach the toolbar by hitting tab or arrowing to it.  The keyboard shortcut to reach a Tool Window’s toolbar is Shift + Alt .  Note that Alt + Shift will not work...

Since almost everyone has asked me to share this story on my blog… On Friday, after the conference was over, I drove my little scooter to the Subway near the convention center, about 2 blocks away.  On my return, a guy sitting at a Starbucks asks...

Go to Tools – Options – Text Editor – All Languages – General , and check Line numbers to show line numbers for all files.  If you just want to see (or not see) the line numbers of a specific file, you can override this global setting by going to...

After you drag a tool window to an undocked position, you can quickly redock the tool window to the previous location by Double-clicking the titlebar. Also, you may notice some tool windows are in "tool window groups" (as shown in the image...

With the desired tool window selected, press Alt+Minus to bring up the tool window menu.  Press Down Arrow to select the Move command and hit Enter.  Now you can control the tool window with the arrow keys. To dock, simply use the arrow keys...

Back in the Visual Studio 2003 days, you had to go to File – Page Setup, and check “Line numbers” (in the lower-left hand corner) in order to print line numbers, regardless whether they were visible in the editor.  For Visual Studio 2005, we moved...

Update : There was a trackback here to Brian Williams’s blog , but unfortunately, due to the 100s of comment spam attacks each night, it got lost.  So 2 years ago this day, I called my mom to tell her I made it to the Visual Studio homepage for my...

When a tool window is not docked… Press the Alt key once Press the Spacebar key once.  You will get the standard window system menu with Move and Size.  Select Size Now, just arrow towards the window edge you wish to resize, and resize from...