At Nebraska Code Camp this past weekend, Mike Douglas talked a bit about the developer productivity enhancements included in VS2013. One of the features that I’d missed until his talk was the vertical scroll bar’s map mode.

Beyond the now familiar annotations for changes, errors, and cursor position, the scroll bar’s map mode shows a low-resolution depiction of the structure of the code in the current file. This can be helpful for ascertaining the context of a particular piece of code or identifying duplicated code by observing patterns in the structure, among other things.

Perhaps just as useful is that when map mode is enabled, the scroll bar can also show a tooltip containing a preview of the code at any point on the map. To see the tooltip, simply hover over a point of interest.

I’ve only just started to use this feature but I think it’ll aid immensely in code discovery.