15 Tips to Boost Your Productivity in Visual Studio

hi my name is Daya I'm a product manager on the visual studio team in this video I want to share with you some tips that will help you be more productive in Visual Studio what you're seeing here is a very simple application that I built for this demo it's a rock paper scissors game the first tip I want to share with you is the most fundamental one which is to learn your keyboard shortcuts there's lots and lots of keyboard shortcuts out there the more you learn the keyboard shortcuts and you keep your hands on the keyboard instead of reaching for the mouse the better because not only are you saving time but you're also not context switching one of the really important shortcuts that I use all the time is the control Q shortcut to search for other shortcuts as well so for example one of the shortcuts I had a really hard time remembering is to comment out the current line I'm on so I would look up comment and find out that it's not control slash it's control key slash and I wasn't used to that in other programs I would just use control slash all the time so the other tip that I want to share here is that you don't have to go with the default shortcuts what I ended up doing I actually ended up overriding the defaults for commenting out online and you can do that by going to the keyboard settings options page it's under options environment keyboard you can search for any keyboard shortcut that you want to override in my case I want to override the comment out align shortcut you select it you'll see what the current shortcut here is and you can switch it out so for me I want to switch it out to control slash assign it press OK and now I can just use it to comment out online I don't have to do Ctrl K Ctrl sash anymore I can just use control slash the other thing I want to point out is I know a lot of people switch back and forth between programs so if you want to use shortcuts from a different program you can actually do that in visual studio so if you go back to the keyboard shortcuts page that I was on you can switch the the shortcuts that you're using to a different program for example I know a lot of people use vs code and switch between vs code and visual studio if you want to use a shortcuts from vs code in Visual Studio you can select this option and do that uh one of the ways that I've learned a lot of shortcuts is using the visual studio cheat sheet so you can access that actually directly in Visual Studio by going and uh looking up keyboard and then you can do you can click on that first reference here which is gonna find the page that we have on keyboard shortcuts um what I ended up doing was I actually ended up printing off this cheat sheet and I would go through it every week and learn a couple of shortcuts and just force myself to use it all the time so that next time my muscle memory is right there and I remember how to use some of those shortcuts and some of these you'll probably already know so you can scratch it off that's done but some others you might be thinking oh I need to learn that so next time you can try to use those keyboard shortcuts so you're building that muscle memory my next tip is around navigating your code quickly we actually spend a lot more time reading code than writing code so it's really important to learn how to navigate your code quickly so let me show you an example of how I do this let's say I am in my test class and this test is actually failing right now so if you take a look at uh the expected result and what it's providing it's taking in scissors and it's not assigning it to the right enum so instead of going all the way to the method definition and kind of going back and forth between your test class and your implementation what I like to use is the alt F12 uh keyboard shortcut or the peak definition feature and what that does is it gives you the method implementation or the definition right within your view so you're not having to go back and forth and if you want to make any changes you can make it right in here so for example in this case I made a classic error of copying pasting something without actually replacing the value so in this case I'll change it to scissors and what you'll notice now is my tests are passing and if you're wondering heydaya you didn't actually have to run any tests I'm using this really awesome feature that I found out about recently called live unit testing and the feature is a feature that allows you to continuously run tests as you're changing code I didn't even have to save the file here and it's running the test continuously the feature is only available in Enterprise so if you have access to the Enterprise Edition you have access to this really cool feature so back to navigation so Peak definition alt F12 is one that I really like to use the other one I like to use and by the way you can use escape to get out of peak definition mode um the other shortcut that I really like to use is the control shift backspace and that shortcut goes to the last place that you changed any code so for example I just changed the code in the implementation from paper to scissors and when I use the Ctrl shift backspace it took me where I changed the code and I know sometimes you don't really want to just change code and not look at the contacts make sure that no one else is using your code so in case you want to go to the last place that you edit it you can use Ctrl shift backspace the other one I use all the time is control minus and that one will just kind of navigate through Visual Studio and go backwards and then you can use Ctrl shift minus to go forward so think kind of a browser kind of situation where you're just kind of going backwards to where you were um you can also use the control tab shortcut to switch between Windows just kind of similar to you know alt tab in Windows you can use that control tab in visual studio and switch between the classes that you're writing um I know there's a lot of navigation shortcuts so if you're ever wondering about more navigation shortcuts or what they are there's this secret menu that I recently found out about and it's the alt back tick um shortcut and it brings up this menu that's different than what you do what you get when you right click on a file and it brings up some of the most common uh shortcuts that I talked about and it talks about some of the navigation shortcuts as well so that's just kind of cool just in case you don't know that this secret menu exists the next tip that I want to share with you is around reading code and it's around the feature that we recently added to visual studio that I think is really helpful for readability and it's called a sticky scroll so the way that you can enable these features by going to control Q and searching searching for sticky and you'll notice that it's under text editor General There's a sticky scroll section here and once you enable this feature what's going to happen here is that you're going to be able to see this section at the top that shows you the class or the method definition along with the code block you can't really see it in my test class let's go back here because I think you can see it a lot better here so for example when I was writing the while loop for my play Method it was really helpful to have sticky scroll on because I could see that I am in a while loop right now I actually didn't have a way to exit out of the game previously and then which is really dangerous but because I saw that there's I'm in a while loop I remember to add my break condition in my while loop generally it's really helpful to have sticky scroll if you have long methods I heard recently that it's a code smell to have long methods if that's the case any code base that I've worked on is really stinky because that's just really common everywhere so if you have long code you know if you have long methods or long classes you could really benefit from sticky scroll so that as you're writing code you can kind of see what's the top level of the code block that you're in the next set of tips I want to share with you is around editing code a lot of time when I'm editing code I like to go into full screen so I can limit any distractions you can do that using the alt shift enter key and that will take up as much of your screen as possible with your own code so you're not breaking your flow or anything one of the fundamental keyboard shortcuts to know when your editing code is the control dot shortcut which is going to bring up any quick actions that Visual Studio is recommending for your code for example in this case it's recommending I replace my VAR to an explicit type which is probably a good idea so I'll take that suggestion one more thing that I want to show you around here is if you want to make changes to multiple lines at a time I really like to use the multi-select feature let me show you an example of that let's say I have a few messages here and I want the computer to be a little bit more excited when someone wins what I can do is I can select the line that I want to change or the place that I want to change the line in I can press Ctrl alt and then click in the other positions where I want the cursor to be so I can make those changes and then I can make the changes here so I want to add some exclamation points here and in order to exit out of the mode you can just press Escape and that will allow you to change multiple lines at a time and I know sometimes people have to do that um one more thing that I learned about recently is that a lot of times I'm in the middle of the line and it's obvious that I want to just start a new line so I press enter and I'm like oh no I can't do that well I recently found out that you can actually press shift enter and it will start a new line even if you're in the middle of a line already so I really like that shortcut the last tip I want to share with you is to use code cleanup a lot of times when I'm writing code like this if statement it originally looks something like this where I just focused on getting the logic right but not quite the formatting the way that you can fix that is by using the control K control e shortcut which will invoke code cleanup but even better I actually have it so that it invokes code cleanup whenever I save my file um the way you can do that is to go to your cleanup save setting which is available under text editor code cleanup and then you can enable run code cleanup profile on save so technically speaking if I had done this and I saved the file it will format my file automatically which I really like because I don't like manually formatting my files that's something that should be automated highly recommend turning that on and if your team has specific like formatting that they all use you can use the editor config file in order to change the formatting to whatever your team uses you don't have to use the defaults that Visual Studio provides you you can customize the formatting that your team uses so that it's consisting consistent across repos and that's all I had for you um I hope you found any of those tips helpful there's lots and lots of more tips out there um I will include a link in the description to some more resources that you could use and a place where you can find more shortcuts so you can learn more um more ways to be productive in Visual Studio thanks for watching

Channel: Microsoft Visual Studio

Views: 29,158

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Id: o4kkRqzHDvw

Length: 12min 29sec (749 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 22 2023