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Chapter 3
CHAPTER THREE
Navigating Visual Studio
Hacks 16–23
Visual Studio is a rich development environment including windows, tool-
bars, commands, and editors. Knowing how to quickly and easily move
around the development environment makes developing applications that
much easier. Being able to quickly and easily find the information you are
looking for is a key part of learning how to best work with Visual Studio,
whether that information is a piece of source code or a property for a con-
trol. Any time spent fumbling around the IDE is time wasted.
The hacks in this chapter cover how to arrange and work with windows,
find files quickly, search your files using incremental search and regular
expressions, and navigate your source code using shortcuts and task list
shortcuts. You’ll also learn about a power toy that assigns commands to dif-
ferent mouse buttons and an add-in that enhances the tabs in the document
window.
HACK
#16
Take Control of Your Workspace Hack #16
Dock, float, and size your windows, and save a layout for every mode and
mood.
Visual Studio contains many ways to customize your workspace. Every win-
dow can be moved, docked, or hidden. Visual Studio includes different win-
dow layouts for different modes; modifying a window layout during debug
mode will not affect your window layout while coding. There is even a full-
screen mode. This hack delves into all the ways you can take