Visual Studio 2013 Cookbook: Understanding the latest features of Visual Studio can speed up and streamline your projects. And there's no better learning tool than this collection of focused recipes that gives you the fast, hands-on experience you need.

To explore, launch your copy of Visual Studio 2013.

If you are not prompted to sign in at startup, you can always sign in from within Visual Studio. The arrow in the following screenshot indicates where the Sign in option is located:

Currently, VS2013 will sync options from the following categories:

Microsoft stores a copy of your settings on their servers. A constant Internet connection is not required to use Visual Studio, but your settings will not synchronize until you are reconnected. If a connection is not available, you cannot login until Internet access is restored, but Visual Studio will still be usable. Taking it one step further, VS2013 remembers if you were logged in the last time when you closed the program, so your last known settings will be available as they are stored locally.

All synchronization options are configurable by navigating to Options | Environment | Synchronized Settings, and you may opt to have any combination of the preceding categories synched. This configuration of settings is specific to each machine and does not transfer. By default, VS2013 will attempt to synchronize all settings if you are logged in with a Microsoft account.

All you will need for this recipe is a copy of VS2013 so that you can follow along with where different options are located. The following screenshot provides an overview of what will be covered:

The legend for the highlighted items in the preceding screenshot is as follows:

Over the next few pages, we are going to take a firsthand look at the new areas of the Visual Studio IDE. You may follow along with your own project or use the sample project where indicated.

Feedback

This screenshot shows the choices available when the Feedback menu is accessed by clicking on the chat balloon (far left icon):

Indicated by a chat balloon, the feedback icon provides an immediate way to send feedback to Microsoft from within VS2013. When the chat balloon is clicked, a drop-down list appears, allowing you to select from either Send a Smile (indicating a positive commentary) or Send a Frown (indicating negative commentary). Functionally, there is no difference in the dialog box that appears, but the choice of a smile or frown allows you to provide context for your remarks so that there is no ambiguity in your message. Each option allows you to include an e-mail address so Microsoft has a way to respond, and the frown option has an additional checkbox to indicate whether or not your comments are describing a bug.

The menu also provides the ability to report a bug and access the MSDN forums within Visual Studio. Both options provide a quick way to accomplish these tasks so that you make a report or seek help and get back to coding with minimal distractions.

Notifications

Between the Feedback icon and the Quick Launch field is the flag icon representing notifications:

In the preceding screenshot, you can see that one update is pending. The notification flag is designed to provide an unobtrusive alert when updates to VS2013 and the installed packages are available. Notifications listed in the sidebar are color-coded with yellow and red, which are used to indicate medium and high priorities respectively. Examples of notifications that could appear include notices about updates to Visual Studio, updates to installed extensions or samples, or notices alerting that the trial period is ending. Notifications may be dismissed en masse, and once they are dismissed they do not reappear.

User account

If you have signed in to VS2013 with a Microsoft account (see 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:

It also 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 login. On the right-hand side, you can see the difference when the user has logged in, as the username has replaced the Sign in text, and the gray icon has changed to reflect the user's avatar (which in this case is a green icon overlaid with the white initials of the user's name).

Scroll bar thumbnail

The scroll bar has expanded its usefulness in VS2013. You can now customize it 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 that is called bar mode (which is the traditional scrollbar appearance and behavior). All aspects of the 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 1) indicates that what is being displayed in the editor is located relative to the overall source file. The second arrow (marked as 2) is pointing to the preview tool tip that appears when your mouse cursor hovers over the scroll bar.

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

The following screenshot lists all of 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 VS2013's main Options dialog box by navigating to Tools | Options, with the scroll bar settings listed under Text Editor | All Languages | Scroll Bars. For additional customizations, you may set the language (C++, C#, and so on) settings for the scroll bar in the Options dialog box if desired:

Peek Definition

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, VS2013 will create a mini-window within your current editor. The following screenshot shows the results of using the Peek Definition option on the ConfigureAuth() method:

Sequential peeks can be performed, each opening via a tabbed interface. Navigation between these tabs (represented by circles) 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 (Visual Studio Ultimate Only)

CodeLens, also known as code information indicators, is a feature specific to VS2013 Ultimate. 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 inline with your code will be light colored term references, and the results of executed tests for each method/function as marked by the passing term. The references term indicates the number of places a method is used, and can also display a pop-up window on a mouse over that shows where it has been used. Likewise, the passing term relays the unit test results inline. While working with projects checked out from Team Foundation Server (TFS), CodeLens will also display the most recent author of the method in question. 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 + 3 listing details about unit tests. The display options for CodeLens are labelled as Code Information Indicators in the Options dialog box and can be found under Text Editor | All Languages | Code Information Indicators:

Code Maps (Visual Studio Ultimate Only)

VS2013 Ultimate continues the use of a code visualization tool that 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 VS2013 Ultimate, but VS2013 Premium and VS2013 Professional can only consume them. However, users of Premium and Professional 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 backquote key (typically found sharing a key with tilde). It can also be 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 from the active editor window on the map 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 arrow.

The default .NET Framework in VS2013 is 4.5, so it is very easy to create a project that cannot open in VS2010. If you are not using any features specific to 4.5+, it is merely a matter of changing the project's properties to target 4.0. Keep in mind that some features will not be supported outright, but will be gracefully ignored.

Round-tripping is useful for a number of reasons. While supporting legacy projects, it is usually preferred to alter the existing code as little as possible. The support for older projects means that you can use VS2013 to edit them without keeping a copy of VS2012 installed. It also provides a way for users of VS2013 to work with fellow developers who are yet to upgrade from VS2012.

The best practice is to test upgrading on a backup of your legacy project. This way, you have an easy way to return to the status quo in the event of a failure or complication. Most projects will simply open without any complaint, especially those from VS2012 and, to a lesser extent, VS2010. If Visual Studio doesn't object, it is simply a manner of opening your old project in VS2013 and getting to work. Upon making edits and checking your code (if necessary), fellow developers running VS2010/VS2012 will have no difficulty making their own contributions.

Visual Studio uses solution files to store details about the projects and solutions you create. Ending with the .sln extension, these files help Visual Studio manage your project. For example, a solution created in VS2012 has the following header at the beginning of its SLN file:

Microsoft Visual Studio Solution File, Format Version 12.00
# Visual Studio 2012 

By comparison, a solution created in VS2013 has this header as follows:

Microsoft Visual Studio Solution File, Format Version 12.00
# Visual Studio 2013
VisualStudioVersion = 12.0.20623.1 VSUPREVIEW
MinimumVisualStudioVersion = 10.0.40219.1

The third line (prefaced with #) indicates the "human-readable" version of Visual Studio used to create the project. VS2013 projects add two additional lines to this header as shown in the preceding code snippet. The fourth line shows VisualStudioVersion, which specifies the full build version of Visual Studio used, while the fifth line lists the value MinimumVisualStudioVersion, which indicates the minimum version of Visual Studio that can be used to open the project.

Not every project type supports round-tripping, as some require specific changes to be made in order to run under VS2013. Some notable project types and their exceptions are as follows.

Upgrading an existing project

Depending on the nature of the solution or project you are working on, Visual Studio may require you to convert your project. You will be prompted to make a conversion decision, as shown in the following screenshot:

Tip

If you decide not to upgrade the project, you may do so later via Project | Upgrade Solution. As you may expect, the best practice is to perform a trial conversion on a copy of your solution in the event of something going wrong.

Open either the VS2010_Web sample solution or use a solution of your choice. Ensure that the Solution Explorer window is open.

The following steps will show how the position of open windows can be positioned to your liking. Let's get started:

Visual Studio will move the document from the preview tab area into the main tab area. The color of the tab will also be changed from purple to blue indicating that the tab is now a normal document tab.

Pinning documents works much like pinning does in any other part of Visual Studio, and is very handy for keeping the documents that you are working on regularly within easy reach, especially when you have many documents open at once.

The preview document tab is a great way to prevent tab clutter and becomes very useful while debugging deeply nested code. You may recall that Go To Definition as one function that uses the preview document tab. For example, multiple source files may be opened as you trace a program's operation across methods and classes. The preview document tab helps you cycle quickly through these files while preventing the tab well from filling up with documents that aren't needed for more than a few moments.

As always, there are ways to customize the behavior of the document tabs in Visual Studio.

Single-click preview in Solution Explorer

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

Customizing tab and window behavior

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

There are a number of options here that let you control how the tabs behave. With Visual Studio 2010 Productivity Power Tools, many developers found different ways to configure their tab well to get the experience they wanted, and while not everything from the power tools came across to the final Visual Studio 2012 product, a number of features most certainly did. Feel free to experiment with the Tabs and Windows settings to get Visual Studio working the way you like it most.

Simply start Visual Studio 2013.

To try it out, start by pressing Ctrl + Q, then begin typing the topic/subject that you are looking for, as shown in the following screenshot:

What is important to notice is that Quick Launch can do even more than what may be obvious at first glance. In this example, notice that open was the term entered as a search term. Quick Launch produces a list of results to this query, grouped by the following categories: Menus, Options, and NuGet Packages. As you can see, this list of results is more than just commands, it also includes various areas in the Options dialog as well as NuGet Packages.

You can immediately navigate through the search results with the arrow keys on the keyboard if the desired result is immediately available. You can access a command directly from this list, and where available, the accompanying keyboard hotkey for a command will be listed. In this way, you can learn new shortcuts while doing your daily work.

In the next example, jquery was entered into Quick Launch, producing a list of results that includes context-specific File menu commands (Save and Save As), the option to switch to an open editor window with jquery in the file name (jquery.ui.autocomplete.min.css), or to search NuGet for packages using jquery as the search term.

The following screenshot is showing the availability of these various options:

The Quick Launch option can go further. Let's return to the results of the open term. Note that at the bottom, the Quick Launch option indicates that Ctrl + Q can index through additional views. Additional presses of Ctrl + Q will toggle the list of results to show only results from an individual category, in this case Menus, Options, or NuGet Packages. A final press of Ctrl + Q will return to displaying all of the available results. The ability to toggle through categories is particularly useful when your Quick Launch list is lengthy and you would like to ignore unnecessary categories that are cluttering the list of results. Pressing Esc once will clear the search results in Quick Launch, and pressing Esc again will return you to the open file in your editor.

Tip

Using the Command Window / Command Aliases

The Command Window (accessible via Ctrl +Alt +A and available on premium editions of VS2013) allows you to keep your hands on the keyboard while quickly accessing commands via an integrated command prompt window. As Microsoft ships Visual Studio preloaded with command definitions, entering an alias will display all of the currently defined commands, and the alias cmd action (where cmd is the desired name of your alias and action defines what should happen) will allow you to define your own. You can see from the following screenshot that typing bl is much faster than typing Debug.Breakpoints. Note that by default, command aliases are stored as part of your synchronized profile:

To best see this in action, open a project that has multiple files available for editing. This can be the sample project or one of your own choice. Once it is open, simply open a couple of source files.

Pressing Ctrl + Tab provides easy access to a couple of different ways to navigate around Visual Studio. If Ctrl + Tab is pressed and immediately released, Visual Studio will alternate between the two most recent files that you have opened in the editor window. This provides a quick way to move back and forth. If Ctrl + Tab is pressed and Tab is released, a pop-up window will appear. Continue to hold down Ctrl when it appears, and then arrow keys can be used to maneuver around the list of all active files and windows. To make a selection, either release Ctrl while highlighting the desired target, or while holding Ctrl, press Enter. This is shown in the following example's screenshot, where active files currently open in Visual Studio are shown in the right-hand side column, while open tool windows are shown in the left-hand side column:

If you would rather take a hybrid (mouse + keyboard) approach, the window Ctrl + Tab produces also supports selection by mouse. Start in the same manner as done earlier in this recipe, holding down Ctrl + Tab to bring up the window. Release Tab while holding down the Ctrl key and then use your mouse to left-click directly on the file you would like to switch to.

Quickly searching your code

Searching a project file to find specific strings of text is a common daily task 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.

Tip

The Incremental Search option (Ctrl + I) is a quick way to search within the file you are currently editing. When activated, a Find dialog box appears in your active editor window, allowing you to enter search terms.

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 file that's currently open, 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 certain 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's screenshot, a simple regular expression 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.

Open the same VS2010_Web solution that we have been using for the other recipes in this chapter or choose a solution of your own.

The Navigate To feature from Visual Studio 2010 was a fantastic addition to Visual Studio. It had problems in large projects with many search matches as the location of a match was embedded in the result itself, making it hard to locate the specific match you were after. The new Solution Explorer search tool provides similar results to the Navigate To feature, but having the location of a match represented in the tree view makes it very easy to quickly identify the specific match you are interested in.

It's worth mentioning a few other things about searching within your solution.