Mastering Visual Studio 2005 editor

Block Selection

Visual Studio has a feature that allows you to get around this limitation. By holding the Alt key while selecting text, you trigger block selection, which allows you to select text regardless of what line it is on.

Block selection can be used to select any amount of text in a block, as opposed to line by line. You can use block selection whether you select text with the mouse or the keyboard (hold down Alt and Shift, and press the arrow keys to perform a block selection with the keyboard).

When pasting block selections, Visual Studio will insert each line of the block onto a subsequent existing line, unlike normal selections where new lines will be inserted. Thus, it is important to be sure that the destination for your block selection is the same number of lines as the source.

Line breaks

There are quite a few ways to specify line breaks: ControlChars.NewLine, Environment.NewLine, Char(13), and depending on your language, vbCrLf, \n, and \r\n. Most of these accomplish the same thing: insert the special ASCII characters CR (carriage return), LF (line feed), or both.

The recommended way of adding line breaks is with Environment.NewLine. Unlike the other methods, this will insert the appropriate ASCII representation of a line break: an LF for Unix, a CR for Apple, and a combination of the two for Windows.

However, practicality often supersedes portability, and for most cases, escaped carriage returns (i.e., \r and \n) are the absolute simplest to use. SmartPaster allows you to easily configure which option to use.

Complete Word

The first, and most useful, IntelliSense feature is actually just a shortcut: Ctrl-Space (Edit.CompleteWord). By using the Ctrl-Space shortcut, you can summon IntelliSense at any point during your coding session, not just when you finish typing a class name. This is one of the few shortcuts that can really change the way that you write code.

If you have already starting typing when you press Ctrl-Space, Visual Studio will take one of two actions. If there is only one object that matches what you have typed in so far, it will automatically complete the object name; for instance, if you typed in HttpR, it would automatically complete the rest of the object name (HttpRequest). If there are a number of objects that match what you have typed in, it will display the full list of members with the first match highlighted.

Parameter Info

Another useful form of IntelliSense is the parameter information that is shown after you type the opening parenthesis of a method (it goes away when the parentheses are closed). When editing an already existing method, it would be nice to have this information again without having to delete and then reenter the opening parenthesis, wouldn't it? As long as the cursor is located inside of the method parameters parenthesis, pressing Ctrl-Shift-Space (Edit.ParameterInfo) will display the parameter information pop up.

Quick Info

When you move your mouse over a method or variable, you will see a small tool tip pop up that contains information about that method or variable. This is commonly called Quick Info. If you are navigating by keyboard, you can also get this small pop up by pressing Ctrl-K and then Ctrl-I (Edit.QuickInfo). Using this shortcut is also the only way to bring up this informational pop up during debug, since the default behavior is to show the value of the object you are hovering over when using the mouse.

Adding guidelines:

1. Close Visual Studio.

2. Open regedit (Start -> Run -> type regedit).

3. Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\<7.1>\Text Editor.

4. Right-click on the Text Editor key and choose New -> String Value and name it "Guides".

5. Set the value of the guides to RGB(128, 128, 128) 4, 16.

The first part of the value sets the color of the guidelines using common red, green, and blue values. 128, 128, and 128 sets the color of the guidelines to gray. The second numbers specify where the guidelines should appear. In this example, guidelines will be shown at the 4-space mark as well as the 16-space mark. You can add up to 13 different guidelines by simply adding more numeric values separated by commas.

After you have created your registry entry, you will see guidelines in the marks specified when you launch Visual Studio.