Visual Studio Editor Blog : feedback

Visual Studio 2010 Beta2 Released

VSEditor — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 17:29:00 GMT

Visual Studio 2010 Beta2 has shipped! As of today (Wednesday, October 21), it’s publicly available as a free download. Check out this page for the official product and download information.

Find out more about the VS 2010 release

Want more information about what’s new, what’s changed, and what to expect in Beta2? Rather than write our own version of what others have already said quite well, we’d encourage you to check out these announcements:

The official Microsoft press release for Beta2 describes VS 2010’s new SKU structure and announces a March 22, 2010 launch date
S. Somasegar announces Beta2
Jeff Beehler explains the “Go Live” license for Beta2
Scott Hanselman shares some of his favorite new features
Dave Mendlen talks to Ars Technica about the new SKU structure

Dive into the VS 2010 IDE

In addition to the IDE itself, there is a ton of content to help you get started with or dive further into Beta2. Here are just some of the resources available:

Send your feedback

Once you’ve downloaded VS 2010 Beta2, we’d love to hear from you! As always, there are many ways to share your thoughts:

Post feedback in the Beta2 forums
File a bug or suggestion for any issues you find
Leave a comment on this blog post
E-mail the Editor team directly
Follow and/or contact @VSEditor on Twitter

Whichever method you choose, I hope you’ll let us know what you think. Enjoy Beta2!

Brittany Behrens
Program Manager, VS Platform Team

Searching and Navigating Code in Visual Studio 2010

VSEditor — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 21:38:00 GMT

Every developer knows that navigating code is vital to happy and productive coding. We’ve added several new features for code search and navigation in Visual Studio 2010, including Navigate To and an improved Call Hierarchy, to complement search staples like the Find and Replace dialog and Incremental Search. With such a wide variety of options, we thought it would help to describe many of VS 2010’s code search and navigation features, from old favorites to new additions, in one place:

Find and Replace

The Find and Replace dialog provides your basic search functionality. It comes in three flavors:

· Quick Find (Ctrl+F): Optimized for smaller searches, Quick Find is best for searching open documents for a string or expression. It also provides basic options for search scope, partial word matching, case sensitivity, searching up vs. down, and use of regular expressions or wildcards in searches.

· Find in Files (Ctrl+Shift+F): A more robust option, Find in Files is better for searching entire projects or solutions. Unlike Quick Find, Find in Files can list search results in the Find Results window and has additional options to specify which file extensions to search.

· Find Symbol (Alt+F12): Find Symbol allows you to search for symbols, including objects (namespaces, types, interfaces, enumerations, etc.) and members (classes, properties, methods, events, constants, variables, etc.).

Want to use the Find feature without the dialog? Find Next (F3) will take you to the next occurrence of the text in the toolbar’s Find combo box, which is usually your most recent search term. To start a new search, just select your desired text in the editor and use Find Next Selected (Ctrl+F3) to jump to the next occurrence of that text.

Incremental Search

Incremental Search (Ctrl+I) is fast, lightweight, and interactive, allowing you to search for partial words and refine your search in real time. It uses very little screen real estate, doesn’t cover up your code, and is great for quickly finding a piece of code in your current file.

Navigate To

Navigate To (Ctrl+comma), new for Visual Studio 2010, is a powerful way to search, especially when you’re not sure exactly what you’re looking for. It helps you locate items in your code by using "fuzzy" search capabilities. For example, if you type Foo Bar instead of FooBar, Navigate To will still return useful results. It’s a smart, incremental search that refines as you type and will find any symbols (e.g. file, type, and member names) matching your search terms.

Call Hierarchy

Call Hierarchy (Ctrl+ K, Ctrl+T), or right-click and choose “View Call Hierarchy”, helps you understand the flow of code execution in more complex solutions and projects (C# only). Invoking Call Hierarchy on a method, property, indexer, or constructor in the source code shows you a tree of all the calls to and from that method, property, etc. Each method, property, and constructor in the Calls To and Calls From nodes can also be expanded into its own Calls To and Calls From sub-nodes. Call Hierarchy is great for navigating by code path or understanding relationships between functions.

Go To Definition

Go To Definition (F12) does what its name suggests: it takes you to the definition of a given symbol. It works for a variety of symbols, including methods, types, classes, members, and more. It’s great for diving into implementation details, especially when reading code.

Navigate Backward/Forward

Navigate Backward (Ctrl+minus) and Navigate Forward (Ctrl+Shift+minus) allow you to quickly move between places you’ve already been in your code. For example, say you just used Go To Definition and now you want to go back to where you came from. It’s easy – just use Navigate Backward. If you’re interested in exactly how this works or how we determine exactly where to navigate you back to, check out Sara Ford’s blog post for details.

Highlight References

Highlight References is another new feature in Visual Studio 2010 (C# and VB only). Any time you place the blinking caret on a symbol, Visual Studio will automatically highlight all instances of that symbol for you. So what does this have to do with navigation? You can actually cycle through these highlighted references – just use Ctrl+Shift+up arrow and Ctrl+Shift+down arrow to move to the previous or next highlighted symbol.

All of these are available in VS 2010 Beta1, so I’d encourage you to try them out, especially the new-for-VS 2010 Navigate To and Call Hierarchy features. Like what you see? Have suggestions for improvements? Want to share your favorite navigation tips & tricks? Please leave a comment and let us know!

Brittany Behrens
Program Manager, VS Platform Team

Where did the Editor team go?

VSEditor — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 05:53:00 GMT

You may have noticed that we haven’t been blogging quite as often lately, which begs the question, “What has the Editor team been doing since Beta1?” The answer: a lot! We’ve been focusing on a few specific goals since Beta1, and this post should give you a better idea not only of what we’re working on but also what you can expect in Beta2.

Major Performance Improvements

As many of you have noticed, Beta1 performance is not at the level that you and we expect for an RTM product. Many tasks take too long and use too much memory. We knew that when Beta1 shipped, and we’ve made performance a major priority for Beta2.

As VS General Manager Jason Zander and VS Platform Architect Rico Mariani have said on their blogs, the Visual Studio team tracks the performance of a wide variety of scenarios. These include specific tasks like scrolling in the editor as well as bigger-picture end-to-end scenarios that involve a series of tasks spanning the entire edit-compile-debug cycle. The VS Platform team alone, including Editor, owns and tracks more than 20 critical scenarios. We’ve made huge perf and memory usage improvements since Beta1, and in many cases VS 2010 Beta2 performance will be even better than VS 2008!

In addition to working on performance in general, we made a specific effort to improve Visual Studio’s performance over remote desktop. We know this is an important use case for many of you and that Beta1 is particularly slow over RD connections. The VS Platform and WPF teams invested heavily in improving the remote experience for Beta2, especially scrolling and IntelliSense, and the difference is noticeable not only in automated performance testing but more importantly in day-to-day usage. We sought out internal users of VS 2010 who connect to machines in Redmond but are based as far away as Australia, and they have noticed major increases in Visual Studio 2010’s performance that translate into increases in their productivity. Whether you’re remoting into VS running on a virtual machine, a physical machine down the hall, or a machine thousands of miles away, you’ll see a greatly improved experience for Beta2.

Many Bug Fixes

Thank you to everyone who filed a Connect bug, posted in a feedback forum, or sent us an e-mail to report issues in Beta1; it really does make a difference. A few posts ago, we gave a status update on some of the most commonly-encountered Beta1 bugs. I’m happy to report that all of those bugs – and many more that were less commonly reported – are now fixed for Beta2!

In addition to user-reported issues, we’ve fixed a variety of internally-reported bugs and invested in fine-tuning the product to make Beta2 feel more polished. Many people within Microsoft, both in Visual Studio and working on completely different products, are using VS 2010 as their production environment, which helps us find and fix bugs that users are likely to encounter in day-to-day development. As we move closer to a finalized product, the Editor team has also been working on “fit and finish” issues that range from refining extensibility points to doing pixel cleanup on UI components. Both quantitatively and qualitatively, Beta2 is shaping up to be a stable, high-quality release of VS 2010.

The Return of your Favorite Features

We focused more heavily on improving performance and fixing bugs than on adding features for Beta2, but you’ll still see some new and exciting additions. In Beta2 you’ll see the return of two of your favorite VS 2008 features: box selection and the clipboard ring. C++ users will also notice the return of drag & drop editing, which is present for managed but not native languages in Beta1. The new-for-VS 2010 zoom feature you saw in the CTP and in Beta1 has been improved too: not only does it provide an easy way to return to 100% zoom and not zoom scrollbars, but it also includes new UI to make zooming even easier. Most of the Editor features you’ll see in VS 2010 were already present in Beta1, but there were a few that you told us you couldn’t live without; again, your feedback truly does make a difference.

VS 2010 Beta2 sounds great. When can I get it?

More and more of you are asking when Beta2 will be released. The release date hasn’t been announced, so we can’t say just yet. But we certainly will post here when the date is public and again when Beta2 becomes available.

In the meantime, please do continue to use Beta1 and send us feedback through Connect bugs, forum posts, e-mail to the Editor team, and now Twitter. Your input has helped us make huge improvements in VS 2010 since Beta1, and I hope you’ll continue to let us know what you think all the way through RTM.

Brittany Behrens
Program Manager, VS Platform Team

Common Editor Issues in VS 2010 Beta1

VSEditor — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 20:29:00 GMT

Thank you to everyone who has downloaded and tried VS 2010 Beta1 so far! In the two weeks since Beta1 was released, you’ve sent us tons of feedback that has helped us fix some of the most commonly reported bugs. This post details frequently-encountered bugs and their status, in no particular order:

Background Color of the Editor is always white

Status: Patch available for download here
The Bug: Setting a custom background color for the editor works once, but every new editor window opens with a white background. This can be fixed by going to Tools->Options->Environment->Fonts and Colors and simply clicking OK, but it’s annoying to have to do that every time you open a new tab or restart VS.
The Solution: This should be fixed for the next release of VS 2010. For Beta1, there is an extension written by a member of the VS Editor team as a patch that will allow custom background colors to persist. You can find it in VS by going to Tools->Extension Manager and searching for the "BackgroundPatchExtension," or download it from a web browser here. Once you install it, just make sure it is enabled in the Extension Manager, and your background color should be applied correctly.

Outlining Highlight Color flickers or makes text unreadable on dark backgrounds

Status: Fix in progress
The Bug: The highlight color when you mouse over an outlining region is not currently configurable, and the default color makes text difficult to read on dark backgrounds. Some users also notice that the highlight causes a flicker effect when moving the mouse from the editor to the toolbox, line number margin, breakpoint margin, or other margins on the left.
The Solution: We plan to choose a better default color that should make the highlight better for dark backgrounds. We also plan to make the highlight color configurable, so you can choose a custom color that works with your preferred color scheme. This also gives the ability to avoid the flicker by setting the highlight color equal to your editor background color. You should see these changes in the next release of VS 2010.

Some Fonts do not work, and Text in the Editor may appear blurry

Status: Fix in progress
The Bug: Some fonts, custom and available in Tools->Options, will display as Consolas instead of the desired font. Text in the Editor, tooltips, or IntelliSense may also appear blurry to some users.
The Solution: Because the new VS 2010 Editor is based on WPF, its font rendering has different advantages and limitations than the editor in previous versions. WPF supports only TrueType vector-based fonts, so selecting a bitmap or non-TrueType font will cause the editor to revert to the default font, i.e. Consolas. Some of the fonts in the Beta1 list in Tools->Options->Environment->Fonts and Colors are not TrueType fonts and will also not work, and we have now removed these fonts from the list for future versions of VS 2010.

We are also working with the WPF team to make significant improvements to the Editor's font rendering for the final version of VS 2010, which should reduce the blurriness of text in the Editor, tool windows, IntelliSense, and tooltips. In the meantime, it may help to run the ClearType tuning tool to improve font clarity in the VS Editor and other applications. You can also track the WPF team’s work on font rendering.

Mouse-Wheel Scrolling in the Editor is slow

Status: Fixed
The Bug: When using the mouse wheel, the editor scrolls very slowly or sometimes not at all. Other applications scroll as expected.
The Solution: The editor was not respecting system-wide settings for the mouse wheel as configured in the Control Panel. This has been fixed and should work correctly in the next release of VS 2010.

Scrolling with a Laptop Touchpad does not work

Status: Fix in progress by the WPF team
The Bug: When you try to scroll the editor with a laptop’s touchpad, nothing happens.
The Solution: None yet, but the WPF team is working on this issue. You can track its status here.

Editor does not scroll horizontally when selecting text with Ctrl+Shift+arrow keys

Status: Fixed
The Bug: When using Ctrl+Shift+arrow to select text, arrowing off the screen does not cause the editor to scroll horizontally. The caret goes off the screen, but you can’t see where it went.
The Solution: This has been fixed and should work correctly in the next release of VS 2010. The workaround for Beta1 is to use Shift+arrow instead of Ctrl+Shift+arrow or to select out-of-view text with the mouse.

Zoom: Scrollbars should not zoom, and there is no way to quickly return to 100% zoom

Status: Fix in progress
The Bug: When using Ctrl+mouse wheel zooming, scrollbars also zoom and quickly become too large or small. There is also no way to quickly return to 100% zoom.
The Solution: We are planning significant improvements to the zoom feature that should fix both of these issues for the next release of VS 2010. You can track these issues here and here.

Mouse Cursor becomes invisible

Status: Fixed
The Bug: When using Visual Studio, the mouse cursor sometimes becomes invisible, seemingly at random.
The Solution: We discovered and fixed a bug in the Regular Expression Editor extension, available on the Visual Studio Gallery or through the Extension Manager in VS. We believe that this bug is isolated to the RegEx Editor extension and is now fixed. If you downloaded v1.0 of the RegEx Editor it and are seeing this problem, please uninstall and reinstall it or use the Updates section of the Extension Manager to download the fixed version.

First item in a Smart Tag is not selected by default

Status: Fixed
The Bug: Invoking a smart tag by clicking on it or pressing Ctrl+. brings up the tag, but the first item in the correction list is not selected by default.
The Solution: This has been fixed and should work correctly in the next release of VS 2010.

Arrow keys do not move caret on wrapped lines

Status: Fixed
The Bug: When word wrap is enabled, pressing the up and down arrows may not move the caret.
The Solution: This has been fixed and should work correctly in the next release of VS 2010. For Beta1, the workaround is to disable word wrap or use the mouse to navigate away from a wrapped line.

Context Menu location is wrong

Status: Fixed
The Bug: Right-clicking in the editor causes the context menu to appear at the location of the blinking caret instead of the location of the mouse cursor.
The Solution: This has been fixed and should work correctly in the next release of VS 2010.

If you’re seeing other issues, please post a comment, check the Beta1 Editor forum, or file a new bug and we’ll investigate. Your feedback helps us find and fix bugs faster and improve Visual Studio, so keep it coming!

Brittany Behrens
Program Manager, VS Platform Team

The new Box Selection, now with Multi-Line Editing!

VSEditor — Tue, 26 May 2009 06:15:00 GMT

Since VS 2010 Beta1 became publicly available last week, the Editor team has heard from quite a few users who miss box selection (aka column selection, block selection, or rectangular selection). Yes, it’s missing from the beta, but the good news is that it will be back and better than ever for the final release of VS 2010.

Not only will you be able to make, copy/paste, drag/drop, and delete box selections, but you’ll also have the new ability to insert and edit text on multiple lines. Check out this video we’ve created to demo the new Box Selection and Multi-Line Editing functionality (this demo has video and audio, so plug in your headphones or turn up the sound):

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To those who miss box selection in Beta1: we hear you. Rest assured that it will be in the final release of VS 2010, and I hope you’ll find it even more useful than in previous versions.

Aside from box selection, there are a few bugs and issues that a lot of folks are seeing, so stay tuned for a post on other known issues in the Editor and possible workarounds. We’ve received a ton of comments, e-mails, and Connect bugs in just a few days, so if you haven’t received a response yet, don’t worry; you will soon. Above all, thanks for downloading VS 2010 Beta1 and sending your feedback – keep it coming!

Brittany Behrens
Program Manager, VS Platform Team

Visual Studio 2010 Beta1 Released!

VSEditor — Wed, 20 May 2009 23:43:00 GMT

It’s official: Visual Studio 2010 Beta1 has shipped! Check out this page for the official product information or download it (free!) here.

So what’s new for the Editor in Beta1? We’ve made significant improvements since the CTP, including better stability and easier extension development. You’ll also notice the return of many of your favorite features:

The redesigned Code Outlining feature that the Editor team and VS General Manager Jason Zander blogged about over the past few weeks
The Track Changes margin, which uses colors to show the changes made in your file
Drag & Drop code editing, copying, and pasting
RTF cut/copy/paste, which allows RTF formatting to persist on copying and pasting text into another application
Incremental Search (Ctrl+I), which refines your search terms as you type them
Visible Whitespace (Ctrl+E, Ctrl+S), which shows visual glyphs for different types of whitespace, e.g. dots for spaces, arrows for tabs
A new default font, Consolas, specifically designed for working with code

And that’s just the Editor. In the VS 2010 Beta, your window layout is more customizable than ever with floating document tabs and expanded multi-monitor support in the VS Shell. You can search for project templates, find new templates online, and download content from the revamped New Project Dialog. You can even use the new Extension Manager to download extensions from within Visual Studio and publish any extensions you write. The list of improvements goes on and on – for more details about what’s new for Beta1 in VS Platform and beyond, take a look at JasonZ’s screenshot-filled blog post.

Now that Beta1 is available for download, there are a few frequently-asked questions:
Q: Is it ‘safe’ to install VS 2010 Beta1 on my machine?
A: Yes! We’ve tested side-by-side scenarios, so installing the beta on a machine with VS 2008 installed is fine. The beta also supports uninstall and should leave VS 2008 and your machine in working order afterward. You can install VS 2010 Beta1 on a VPC if you prefer, though you will notice slower performance than if you run VS on your local machine. And please remember that however you install, this is pre-release software. The VS 2010 Beta1 readme documents major known issues, but it’s not guaranteed to be an exhaustive list.

Q: Can I install on Windows 7?
A: Yes! Installation of VS 2010 Beta1 on the Windows 7 RC is supported, so go right ahead. We don’t recommend installing Beta1 on the Windows 7 beta, though, so please upgrade to the Win7 RC before installing VS 2010.

Q: Is there a VS 2010 SDK?
A: Yes! It’s available for download here. I highly recommend the SDK, as it includes a lot of additional documentation and sample code. It’s a great place to get started with Editor extensibility.

Once you’ve downloaded the VS 2010 Beta, we’d love to hear from you! You can post feedback on the Beta1 forums or file a bug for any problems you find. And as always, you can contact the Editor team directly by posting a comment or using the Email link. No matter how you do it, I hope you’ll let us know what you think.

Enjoy the Beta!

Brittany Behrens
Program Manager, VS Platform Team

How do you use Tab Size and Indent Size?

VSEditor — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 21:32:00 GMT

The Editor team wants to build the best product possible, and we need your help! This week, the team would like to ask for direct feedback on how you use tab size and indent size. Tab size is the amount of space each tab occupies, while indent size is the amount of space automatically inserted for each level of indentation at the left of a line. Both options can be found in Visual Studio under ToolsàOptionsàText Editorà[Your Language]àTabs, and by default both are set to 4 spaces.

For example, if you turn on visible whitespace with tab size = indent size = 4, your code would look like this:

But with tab size = 4 and indent size = 8, the same code would look like this:

One of the many advantages of the new editor is that unlike previous versions, Visual Studio 2010 can support multiple font faces and multiple font heights. With this new capability, there are more choices than ever for how to format your code, which led the Editor team to some interesting design questions. We want to make sure we design features that look great and feel natural in your most important use cases. With that in mind, we'd like to know:

· What are your preferred tab & indent size settings? Why do you choose that particular configuration?

· Do you keep tabs or insert spaces?

· Is there a case where you use different tab & indent sizes? If so, please tell us the scenario.

Feel free to leave a comment or use the Email link. The more we understand about how you use Visual Studio, the more we can improve it. And stay tuned for the next post, when we’ll give you a sneak peek and a chance to tell us what you think about an updated UI for code outlining.

Brittany Behrens
Program Manager, VS Platform Team

New Editor, New Font: 10-pt Consolas

VSEditor — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 20:18:00 GMT

To complete the VS 2010 Editor’s new look, we’re updating the default font to 10-pt Consolas! It’s a fixed-width font that Microsoft’s typography experts designed specifically for developers, so it’s great for reading and writing code. Consolas also has proportions that are closer to normal text than Courier New, the default for VS 2005 and 2008, making it more readable while still maintaining monospaced width. Here’s a side-by-side comparison:

You’ll see the new default font in the upcoming VS 2010 beta, but the Editor team is also interested in your feedback now. Although it’s new to the default role, Consolas has been around for a few years, so you can try it in your current version of Visual Studio. If you’re running Windows Vista, you already have Consolas installed; just go to ToolsàOptionsàEnvironmentàFonts and Colors in Visual Studio and change the font. If not, it’s available as a free download from Microsoft here.

To see the best results, I strongly recommend turning on ClearType in Windows XP or Vista before trying Consolas. ClearType improves font quality and readability in WPF and can be optimized for your display. For instructions on how to enable and configure it, check out Microsoft’s ClearType tuner here.

I hope you’ll enjoy Consolas’s natural readability for coding in VS. As always, please use the comments and e-mail link to send us your thoughts. Love the new font? Have ideas to improve it? Let us know!

Brittany Behrens
Program Manager, VS Platform Team