Visual Studio and Git

So it happens that the company I started working for yesterday uses Git for all their source control needs. Having heard a lot of positive stuff about Git, but having no experience of actually using it,I had to dig around to find some decent integration tools that work well with Visual Studio 2013.

To my surprise, as of Visual Studio 2012.2, Microsoft already supports Git (I had to double check this and pinch myself!) There are Visual Studio Tools for Git available for download directly from Microsoft and there is quite a chunky write up Getting Started with Git in Visual Studio and Team Foundation Service

Will try it out at work today!

Diagnostic Tools debugger window in Visual Studio 2015

What are Diagnostic Tools?

First let’s define what we mean when we say “Diagnostic Tools” in Visual Studio. Diagnostic tools means different things to different people, and some would consider the debugger itself to be a diagnostic tool. In this context, when we say Diagnostic Tools, we mean tools that allow you to see historical information (data collected over time), as opposed to just a single moment in time (like when you are stopped at a live breakpoint). By that definition, there are three main examples of diagnostic tools that were available previously in Visual Studio 2013:

The Output window: allows you to see program output and other debugger events while it is running
IntelliTrace: allows you to see interesting events in your application and set the debugger back in time so that you can look at historical data in the Call Stack, and Locals windows. You can also see the list of every method call and its parameters (even when that method is no longer on any call stack).
The Performance and Diagnostics hub: allows you to perform a comprehensive performance analysis of your app as it runs without the debugger. You have your choice of performance tools to use, such as the CPU Usage tool and the Memory Usage tool, depending on the nature of the performance issue.
As you will see, we have taken all of these diagnostic tools and brought them closer together into a unified window. This new experience offers you two benefits:

The ability to monitor performance while debugging, and correlate performance data with debugging activity, and
A much richer and more useful experience for IntelliTrace and the Output window, dramatically shortening the time it takes you to diagnose an issue or verify a fix.

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Configure Visual Studio 2013 for debugging .NET framework

In order to configure Visual Studio 2013 do the following in the Tools -> Options -> Debugging -> General menu:

• Disable just my code
• Disable step over properties and operators
• Disable require source files to exactly match the original version
• Enable .NET framework source stepping
• Enable source server support

This is what you need to do:

Visual Studio Short cuts.

Learn NEW Stuffs

General:

Shortcut keys	Description
Ctrl+S	Save current file.
Ctrl+Shift+S	Save all files.
Ctrl+Shift+N	New project.
Shift+Alt+N	New website.
Ctrl+N	New file.
Ctrl+Shift+O	Open project/solution.
Shift+Alt+O	Open website.
Ctrl+O	Open file.
Ctrl+P	Print
Alt+F4	Exit
Ctrl+Z	Undo
Ctrl+Y	Redo
Ctrl+X	Cut
Ctrl+C	Copy
Ctrl+V	Paste
Ctrl+Shift+V	Cycle Clipboard Ring
Del	Delete
Ctrl+A	Select All
Ctrl+F	Quick Find
Ctrl+H	Quick Replace
Ctrl+Shift+F	Find in Files
Ctrl+Shift+H	Replace in Files
Alt+F12	Find Symbol
Ctrl+G	Go To
Ctrl+,	Navigate To

Advanced:

Shortcut keys	Description
Ctrl+E,D	Format Document
Ctrl+E,F	Format Selection
Ctrl+U	Make Lowercase
Ctrl+E,	Delete Horizontal White Space
Ctrl+E,S	View White Space
Ctrl+E,W	Word Wrap
Ctrl+E,W	Word Wrap
Ctrl+I	Incremental search
Ctrl+E,C	Comment Selection
Ctrl+E,U	Uncomment Selection

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Best Visual Studio Extensions

The Visual Studio Gallery is the best place to find tools, controls, and templates to help make your life as a developer easier and more productive. Every so often, I publish my personal list of favorite extensions. This is something I started back when Visual Studio 2010 was first released. A lot has changed since then. I have already published my favorites list for Visual Studio 2013 several times. As new extensions are released, old ones updated or removed, the list does change a bit from time to time. This time, I’m going to separate the list into two sections, those extensions I feel are “must haves” and those I feel are “really nice to have”.

Add images to your code in Visual Studio with the ImageComments extension

Making Visual Studio perfect

ImageComments extension by Luke McQuade lets you show images among code in Visual Studio 2010/2012:

Images in code (Visual Studio 2012 with ImageComments)

To add an image you add the specially formatted image comment to your code, like /// <image url=”X:PathToImage.ext” scale=”Y” />. After that the image is displayed by ImageComments right after the comment. You can easily share images with your team by committing them to the repository with the code file and using $(ProjectDir) or $(SolutionDir) macros in the image url to specify relative path for the image. The scale parameter lets you easily change original image size.

While there are some known issues (plus I’d add that images are visible even after the corresponding block is collapsed), the extension adds very useful functionality in a very easy to use manner.

The free ImageComments extension currently supports Visual Studio 2010 and Visual Studio 2012. You can download it…

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Productivity Power Tools 2013 released

Making Visual Studio perfect

Microsoft has updated their popular extensions pack Productivity Power Tools for Visual Studio 2013. One interesting new feature they have added is Solution Explorer Errors. It shows error, warning, and message squiggles in the Solution Explorer window and hovering over a squiggle displays a popup filtered to the selected file or project with the ability to go to the corresponding problematic file line:

Solution Explorer Errors in Visual Studio 2013

See 10 minutes video describing all 11 new features. Read detailed breakdown for all features and download the tools.

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Visual Commander v1.5 adds navigation to relevant code from compiler errors

Making Visual Studio perfect

Visual Commander is a freemium extension for Visual Studio 2010+ allowing you to automate repetitive tasks in the IDE.

Visual Commander Professional v1.5 adds the ability to double-click on a compiler error in the Compilation status box and navigate directly to the relevant code (line and column of the error):

Navigation to relevant code from a compiler error

Visual Commander v1.5 also adds recording for the Edit.FormatSelection and Edit.FormatDocument commands, improves alignment for displayed command bindings in the main VCmd menu.

Download the installer.

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See more lines of code with syntactic line compression

Making Visual Studio perfect

The recent May 2014 update of Productivity Power Tools for Visual Studio 2013 adds the syntactic line compression feature. “It shrinks lines that contain neither letters nor numbers by 25% vertically, allowing more lines to be displayed in the editor.” In the following sample compressed code takes about 10% less vertical screen space:
Syntactic line compression before and after
In practice most frequently compressed lines are blank ones and lines with braces. If you place opening braces on the same line with code, compressed closing braces will look somewhat odd:
Compressed closing braces
In this case you may want to compress only blank lines. This setting is available in syntactic line compression options:
Syntactic line compression options
I think it’s a nice enhancement that just works.

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Macros for Visual Studio 2013

Making Visual Studio perfect

Visual Studio Platform Team has released the Macros for Visual Studio 2013 extension for VS 2013 to record, edit and execute text editing commands and window operations. You can open the new Macro Explorer tool window from the Tools – Macros menu:

Macro Explorer lists your own macros and preinstalled samples:

Each macro consists of JavaScript code and stored in a .js file that you can edit in Visual Studio as usual. Access to Visual Studio automation model is provided using the familiar dte object:

You can run a macro double-clicking the name in Macro Explorer or assign a keyboard shortcut (for up to 9 macros).

(To react on Visual Studio events like document saving or reuse older VB macros you still need to use the Visual Commander extension. Visual Commander additionally allows you to write command code in C# and provides access to .NET framework.)

You can download Macros…

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