This screenshot shows the choices available when the Send Feedback menu is accessed by clicking on the Send Feedback icon (represented by a person with a chat balloon):

The menu shown in the preceding screenshot provides an immediate way to send feedback to Microsoft from within VS2015. From this menu, you can choose from the following actions:

On the far left of the Quick Launch field is a flag icon that indicates product notifications (if any):

In the preceding screenshot, you can see that three updates are pending. The notification flag is designed to provide an unobtrusive alert when updates are available to VS2015 and its installed packages. Notifications listed in the sidebar are color-coded with yellow and red, which are used to indicate medium and high priority respectively.

Examples of notifications that could appear include the presence of Visual Studio updates, updates to installed extensions or samples, or notice indicating that the VS2015 product license is invalid. Notifications may be dismissed en masse, and once dismissed, they do not reappear:

If you have already signed in to VS2015 with a Microsoft account (refer to the Synchronizing settings recipe), this area displays the graphical avatar, along with your account's display name. The following screenshot shows the difference in the display that occurs when you log in:

The Sign in command provides a way to sign in if you have not done so, or if you wish to change the active account being used. In the preceding screenshot, the left-hand side has the text Sign in, and a grey icon indicates that the user has yet to log in. On the right-hand side, you can see the difference after the user has logged in, as the user's name and avatar has replaced the Sign in text.

Similar to other code editors that you may be familiar with, VS2015 has a configurable scroll bar in its main editor window. It can be customized to show your overall position in a source file, and provide a tool tip that lets you examine code elsewhere in your current file without changing your current location. The new option is called map mode, as opposed to the historical behavior, which is called bar mode (which follows the traditional scrollbar appearance and behavior). All aspects of map mode are customizable, including whether it appears at all, its width (narrow, medium, or wide), and the ability to show the preview tool tip.

The following screenshot shows these features in action:

The preceding screenshot shows the scroll bar configured to be in map mode. The first arrow (marked as 2) indicates what is being displayed in the editor relative to the overall source file. The second arrow (marked as 3) points to the preview tool tip that appears when your mouse cursor hovers over the scroll bar.

The scroll bar's pull-down feature (marked as 1) remains, and when used to split the main window, it allows for two independent viewing panes of the same file, each of which can have its own independent vertical scroll bar. In split view mode, both the vertical scroll bars share the same options (width, bar mode versus map mode, and so on).

The following screenshot lists all the options available for configuring the scroll bar's functionality. It can be accessed directly by right-clicking on the vertical scroll bar and selecting Scroll Bar Options…. Alternatively, it is accessible in the main Options dialog box of VS2015 by navigating to Tools | Options with the scroll bar settings listed under Text Editor | All Languages | Scroll Bars. For additional customizations, you may set language-specific settings (C/C++, C#, and so on) for the scroll bar in the Options dialog box if desired:

Visual Studio has had the Go To Definition (F12) option for several versions now. When we right-click on a method or move the cursor to it, selecting the Go To Definition option will automatically bring you directly to the file with the corresponding definition. While you can easily navigate back and forth with (Ctrl + -) and (Ctrl + Shift + -), sometimes changing the open file is not what you would like to do.

Enter Peek Definition (Alt + F12). This allows you to select a method and look it up, but instead of switching to the appropriate file, VS2015 will create a mini window within your current editor. The following screenshot shows the results of using the Peek Definition option on the PasswordSignInAsync() method:

Sequential peeks can be performed, each opening via a tabbed interface. Navigation between these tabs (represented by circles / marked by the arrow in the preceding screenshot) can be done via the mouse or keyboard: peek forward (Ctrl + Alt + =) and peek backward (Ctrl + Alt + -). The Peek Definition window uses the same scroll bar behavior as that of the parent editing window, and this behavior can be changed in either window by right-clicking on the scroll bar and selecting Scroll Bar Options...

CodeLens, also known as code information indicators, debuted in VS2013 but was limited to the Ultimate edition. In response to user feedback, Microsoft has made it available to both VS2015 Professional and Enterprise. Activated by default, CodeLens provides real-time meta-information about the file you open in your main editor window:

As illustrated in the preceding screenshot, shown in line with your code will be light-colored term references, and the name of the developer with the time since the most recent commit. The references term indicates the number of places a method is used, and can also display a pop-up window upon hovering the mouse over the term that shows where it has been used. If unit testing is part of the project, the number of passing and failing tests can be shown.

VS2015 provides additional functionality using either the source control provided by Team Foundation Server (TFS) or Git. This enables CodeLens to display the most recent author of the method in question, and clicking on that name will pop up a details window listing the change history.

If you would prefer to keep your hands on the keyboard, holding down Alt will bring up hotkeys that can be used to select among the features discussed earlier. The following screenshot illustrates these options, with Alt + 2 opening a pop-up dialog box listing references for the selected method, and Alt + 5 displaying information about who last modified the code. Alt + 7 provides the revision history:

New in VS2015 is the addition of file-level indicators for supported file types. When Visual Studio isn't able to offer details at the code element level, file-level indicators provide similar (although, not identical) functionality. A file-level indicator is shown at the bottom of the editor window when available, as indicated by the arrow in the following screenshot:

The display options for CodeLens are labeled as Code Information Indicators in the Options dialog box, and can be found under Text Editor | All Languages | Code Information Indicators. Alternatively, you may simply right-click on the indicator line, and choose the CodeLens options:

VS2015 Enterprise provides the ability to generate and use a code visualization tool, which Microsoft calls Code Maps, to provide a representation of the open project. The following screenshot shows Code Maps in action:

Code Maps can be created and used in VS2015 Enterprise, but VS2015 Professional and VS2015 Community can only consume them. This means that users of Professional and Community can interact with the maps, and add comments/flags as they are reviewed. Code Maps can be activated in an editor window via Ctrl + `, which is Ctrl plus the back quote key (typically found sharing a key with tilde). It may be also called by right-clicking in the editor window on a particular method or class that you want to map.

Once generated, the map may be manipulated in several ways, including zooming and the ability to expand to show related elements. Individual elements may be double-clicked so that they are brought up in the code editor for closer analysis. An element may also be right-clicked when in the Code Map for further navigation options (Go To Definition, Show Base Types, and so on) or to be commented on. This is particularly helpful for large or complex code bases where a map can assist in comprehension by visualizing the relationships and adding commentary external to the source code.

The Code Map indicates your position on the map from the active editor window with a green arrow icon. In the preceding example's screenshot, the editor is in the Vehicle class, which is pointed to on the Code Map by the green chevron (relationship marked in the preceding screenshot).

The preview tab isn't restricted to just the Find Results window. It can also be used from within Solution Explorer. If you activate the Preview Selected Items button in the Solution Explorer toolbar, then every item you click on will be opened in the preview tab automatically. The Preview Selected Items button is a toggle button. If you want to disable the behavior, then you only need to click on the button to deselect it, and the preview behavior will be turned off:

Navigating to Tools | Options | Tabs and Windows in Visual Studio will show the following dialog box:

There are a number of options here that let you control how the tabs behave. Choices like Show pinned tabs in a separate row or Insert new tabs to the right of existing tabs may be helpful to you. Feel free to experiment with the Tabs and Windows settings to get Visual Studio working the way you like it most.

Searching a project file to find specific strings of text is a common task regularly performed by developers. Visual Studio tries to make this easy by offering specific tools to find and replace text at various levels of your code base. Several options are available under Edit | Find and Replace, including Quick Find, Quick Replace, Find In Files, and Replace In Files.

The Quick Find (Ctrl + F) and Quick Replace (Ctrl + H) options share a common dialog box. Both provide the ability to search the current code block, the current project, all open documents, or the entire solution. If your search options include the currently open file, the vertical scroll bar will highlight any matches found. This provides quick visual feedback on the frequency of a search item:

Another feature that Quick Find and Quick Replace share is the ability to set the following search options: match case, match whole word, and whether or not regular expressions can be used. The use of regular expressions allows for more complex queries to be used, allowing users to extract more detailed information from their searches.

The Find In Files (Ctrl + Shift + F) and Replace In Files (Ctrl + Shift + H) options provide a more advanced method of conducting searches across a code base. They expand on the functionality offered by the quick tools by allowing you to specify the file types that should be searched (for example, all HTML and JavaScript files), and provide the ability to display the results of an operation in a separate window.

In the preceding example screenshot, a text string was used to search the entire solution using the specified file mask. The results were outputted to Find Results 1, which is a live window. This means that you can click on a line with a particular search result, and you will go directly to that file where the match was made. Notice that some of the details provided in the results include the line number and context of the value being searched for.

Assuming you have the Preview icon enabled for Solution Explorer, as you navigate using Solution Explorer to various classes and methods, you may have noticed that the document preview tab updates and shows exactly where the selected class, method, or property was declared. This makes it easy to see what the code is doing without the need to specifically open the file, or scroll through a source file to see the code which is actually inside a method, class, or property. The Preview icon's location in the Solution Explorer window is shown in the following screenshot:

Even though it's possible to extract the structure from CSS, HTML, and JavaScript files, Solution Explorer doesn't show the internal structure of these files. You can navigate to the source file, but not to any of its contents.