Visual Studio Tips and Tricks

This posts frequently encountered scenarios and its solution which will make our life easier.

• Show active file in solution explorer
  Tools -> Options -> Projects and Solutions -> Track Active Item in Solution Explorer
• Show pinned tabs in a separate row
  Tools -> Options -> Environment -> Tabs and Windows -> Show pinned tabs in a separate row
• Turn On/Off Showing Whitespace Characters
  Edit -> Advanced -> View White Space
• Convert TAB to White Space in selected code
  Edit -> Advanced -> Untabify Selected Lines
• Convert selected lines to Uppercase
  Edit -> Advanced -> Make Uppercase

  Keyboard shortcut for upper case : Ctrl+Shift+U
  Keyboard shortcut for lower case : Ctrl+U

• Enable Diagnostic for debugging build error , select
  1. Tools -> Options
  2. Projects and Solutions -> Build and Run
  3. Change “MsBuild project build output verbosity” to “Diagnostic”.
• Set breakpoint in all the methods of Class at once
  1. Bring up the “New Breakpoint” dialog by pressing CTRL+B
  2. Type in ClassName::* to the function field. You may need to include the namespace as well.
  3. This will set the breakpoint to all the methods of ClassName.
  4. You can then disable some of them in the breakpoints window.

• Column Selection
  To enable column selection i.e. select multiple row of text
  1. Go to Selection -> Column Selection Mode menu.
  2. Left Click at the desired point and hold down Shift key
  3. Press down/up arrow to select multiple lines