Category

When working with big solutions containing lots of projects and files, maybe not perfectly organized, one can lose a lot of time with navigation and searching.
Visual Studio together with Resharper provide many helpers for a fast and painless navigation.

Tool versions used: VS 2012 and R# 7
R# keyboard scheme: Visual Studio Layout

Looking for a type

Let’s say you have a class, interface or another type in mind which you want to find. Or probably you don’t know the exact name but parts of it. The classic approach would be to use the Solution Explorer or the Search functionality and manually locate the File which can be a time consuming action in big solutions. With Go to Type… you’re way faster. It’s like an extended search for types with auto suggest functionality.

Menu: Resharper -> Navigate -> Go to Type
Shortcut: CTRL + T

Now simply start typing the name of the type, which then brings up matching suggestions.

Or if you are looking for a view model but don’t know its exact name:

Even just typing the camel case letters is possible.

The other way around

If there is an open file in the editor (e.g. you used the Go to type feature to open a file) and you want to know its location in the Solution Explorer, the Locate feature is very helpful. When triggered the Solution Explorer expands its tree as far as needed, and selects the file in the tree.

Menu: Resharper -> Tools -> Locate in Solution Explorer
Shortcut: SHIFT + Alt + L

Find usages

Finding out about the callers of a specific method or the usage of a type is very comfortable with Find usages. The results of the search are displayed in a nicely arranged tree.
With Find usages advanced… it is also possible to find for example all overriding methods of a method in the base class.

Context-Menu: Right click any type -> Find usages
Shortcut: CTRL-K, R

Go to Implementation

Brings you to the implementation of a type, method, etc. It can also be used to find all the implementations of a method defined in an interface.

Context-Menu: Right click any type -> Go to implementation
Shortcut: CTRL-F12

Hierarchies

If you have complex hierarchies. The hierarchy tree of a type can be easily displayed.

Context-Menu: Right click any type -> Inspect -> Hierarchies
Shortcut: CTRL-E, CTRL-H

Of course there are many more navigation features and this post barely scratches the surface. But the introduced features are the ones which I find the most helpful and which I use a lot when dealing with bigger solutions.

Microsoft offers the developer a variety of ways to debug a Windows Store application. Two for the local development machine which we will not go further into and one to debug the application on another device. Debugging remotely has many advantages for the developer to get a feeling on how his app reacts to a tablet or how well it performs on an ARM processor.

To enable remote debugging on a device one must install the Remote Debugger which can be downloaded from Microsoft under Additional software/ Remote Tools for Visual Studio 2012. There is a Version for each available platform e.g. x86, x64 and ARM. Once installed on the device launch the app by selecting its tile on the start screen and ensure your device is connected to the same network as your development machine.

Now back in Visual Studio 2012, and select the Remote option. On the first time you will be prompted with a menu where if not restricted by IT your device will show up in the same subnet. You can also try to connect to your device by entering the IP address manually.

Now select the start button or just hit F5 and your app will start to compile for the wanted platform. During the start of each remote debugging session you will have to enter your device login. After the app has been deployed it will automatically start up on your device.

Depending on your network the app will run a bit slow because the IDE is attached to the process so don’t worry if everything suddenly feels utterly slow it’s due to network latency.

Nest to debugging your app with breakpoints it is even possible to do performance analysis which may lead you onto the one or other bottleneck on low power ARM devices.

If you want to connect with your project to either another device or the IP of the device as change you can set it again by opening the properties of your start up project and adjust the IP under Debug.