Visual Studio 2013

CTRL + BACKSPACE

I’ve been working in Visual Studio for years – long enough that many of the most useful keyboard shortcuts are now permanently embedded in my finger muscle memory. Sure, there are plenty of shortcuts I need to look up from time to time but I usually think I have a pretty good handle on them. Every once in a while though, I do something silly and Visual Studio either rewards or punishes me in an unexpected way. Today was one of those days.

For whatever reason, I was holding the ctrl key when I hit backspace in VS2013 and suddenly the entire property name just disappeared! I tried it again and the preceding dot disappeared. One more time and the object name disappeared.

I have no idea how it’s taken me this long to stumble upon this shortcut but I’m glad I did! You can see the behavior in the animation below.

VisualStudioQuickBackspace

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Changing the Default TFS Check-in Action

It’s been a number of years since I worked with TFS. Now that I’m back in that world one of the things that has bitten me is that by default any tasks tied to a check-in are resolved by default. Automatically marking tasks as complete has left me scratching my head in bewilderment as I wondered why a task I’m actively working on was no longer listed under my tasks. I can see the utility of this behavior in some circumstances but I often make incremental check-ins as I work through more complex tasks so clearly I don’t want checking in my changes to automatically close the task.

Since relying on my memory to change the check-in action from Resolve to Associate clearly isn’t adequate here I looked for some way to change the default behavior. I found that there are two ways to achieve this, neither of which are obvious.

The first method is to remove the Microsoft.VSTS.Actions.Checkin action from the work item template. The other method applies only to the client machine but requires a registry edit. Neither option is particularly great but given that the first option requires you to have authorization to modify the template and applies to each user of the template, I opted for the second approach.

To disable the default resolution option you need to locate HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\12.0\TeamFoundation\SourceControl\Behavior\ResolveAsDefaultCheckinAction and change the ResolveAsDefaultCheckinAction value from True to False. After making the change, restart Visual Studio and the Associate should now be selected the next time you try adding a work item to the check-in.

ResolveAsDefaultCheckinAction option

More VS2013 Scroll Bar Magic

Yesterday I wrote about map mode, an exciting enhancement to Visual Studio 2013’s vertical scroll bar. If you haven’t enabled the feature yet, go do it, I’ll wait.

If you had the Productivity Power Tools extension installed prior to enabling the feature, you may have noticed that there are some extra annotations in the scroll bar. These annotations, shown in the form of vertical lines and “bubbles” illustrate scope and nesting level.

You can control whether these annotations are displayed by changing the “Show code structure in the margin” setting under Productivity Power Tools/Other extensions in the options dialog. So far, I think they’re pretty helpful so I plan on leaving them enabled; at least for a while.

EnableCodeStructure

VS2013 Scroll Bar Map Mode

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.

EnableScrollbarMap