With these tips, you can increase your productivity in Visual Studio 2022 by a lot! — Visual Studio is a powerful tool with lots of settings and features. I’ll show you some options to increase your productivity and get the most out of the tool. You can move the debug cursor When you hit a breakpoint, you can grab the debug cursor and move it to another line. This is useful to…

You can enable the multi-row setting and use colors to organize files better! — Solutions can get big quite fast. To implement new features or fix bugs, lots of open documents are sometimes necessary. Here is a way to organize the mess in a better way. By default, Visual Studio displays open files as tabs above the editor window. If it runs out of…

Does it take a long time until Visual Studio is ready? Check out this tip to speed up the process! — Visual Studio takes its time to load bigger solutions, we’ve experienced it all at least once I guess. You can use VS Code as a replacement IDE but it might lack essential features in your daily work. So the goal is to make Visual Studio faster. And here is how…

Do you want to get rid of some commands in Visual Studio’s context menus or add new ones? Here is how you do it! — Visual Studio’s context menus are huge and cluttered with commands to please all audiences. But some of them might not be suited for you, so why not remove them? And while we are at it, let’s add new commands that we use frequently. This handy tip improves your productivity by…

Visual Studio is quite flexible when it comes to window layouting. Find out here what you can do to customize your workspace. — Visual Studio offers a lot of tool windows for specific purposes. The most famous ones are the Solution Explorer, Error List, or Output windows. But with all windows open, the UI gets pretty messy and crowded. So here are some tips to organize your windows. ▶ Use Auto-Hide Every window…

The toolbar in Visual Studio can become quite cluttered really fast. Learn how to customize it to your needs. — The Visual Studio toolbar grants quick access to many functions. But it can also be overwhelming to look at a huge number of icons whose purpose might not be clear at first. I’ll show you how you can remove an entire toolbar section or customize its commands. To add or…

The scroll bar area is a mighty tool in Visual Studio that can bring you a lot of additional information with annotations, hints, and a code preview. — To activate the enhanced scroll bar, perform a right-click on it and select Scroll Bar Options. You can either define a common behavior for all languages or set individual values for every single language. Activate all annotation options and use the map mode option with a wide source overview setting.

Sick of stepping through loops until your desired data object is found? Use conditions for breakpoints to speed up debugging! — A conditional breakpoint is just a regular breakpoint that interrupts the app process if a condition is satisfied. A regular breakpoint stops every time the compiler passes by. So you have more control over your debugging workflow. Create a breakpoint by clicking on the first column of your code editor…

The Immediate Window allows to execute code while debugging. Here is how you do it. — You just hit a debugger breakpoint and want to execute some custom code that is not part of the actual code base? The Immediate Window is your friend 👍 Open it with the menu Debugging, then select Windows, and finally choose Immediate Window. Type your code and press enter, it…

Save yourself lots of time by not having to restart your app every time you stepped too far while debugging. Here is a handy helper. — Stepping through code is a daily task for a Software Engineer. But what to do if you stepped too far? Restart the application and do it again? There is a better way 👍 You can grab the yellow debug cursor with the mouse and drop it at another line. The…