Visual Studio Hacks

46

|

Chapter 2, Master the Editor

#9 Master Regions

HACK

this same functionality with VB.NET, you will need to install the

VBCommenter power toy

[Hack #70].

IntelliSense is one of the best features of Visual Studio, and using the short-

cut keys summarized in Table 2-1 will allow you to get the most out of this

great feature.

See Also

• “Enable IntelliSense for HTML and XML Documents” [Hack #32]

HACK

#9

Master Regions Hack #9

Tag, expand, and collapse regions. Visual Studio’s regions let you make even

the largest source files become instantly readable.

Regions are a valuable part of organizing your code and making it more

readable. Using regions, you can select a section of code that you want to be

able to logically group and also collapse. In this hack, you will learn how to

use regions in both C# and VB.NET and learn about an add-in that makes

working with regions even easier.

C# Regions

To use regions in C#, you simply need to surround the code you want to

include in the region with

#region and #endregion. Optionally, you can also

include a string literal after

#region that will be shown when the region is

closed. Figure 2-15 shows an example of C# code surrounded by a region.

Figure 2-16 shows this same region, except collapsed.

Table 2-1. IntelliSense shortcut keys

Command Shortcut keys Description

Edit.CompleteWord Ctrl-Space Completes the current word or shows all avail-

able methods and properties for ...