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.

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.