Monday, March 24, 2008

Code navigation in visual studio

Those who developed with the 2003 version of visual studio, one thing that they seem to miss in the newer versions of vs is the Navigate Back button that used to exist right next to the redo button.

Well Microsoft didn’t remove that feature but based on case studies, not so many developers tended to use it, so they removed it from the out-of-the-box menu configuration. So in order to get access to them, you’ll have to press the “Add or Remove Buttons” option of a toolbar, select “Customize…” and then drag and drop the “Navigate Backward” and “Navigate Forward” buttons that are located under the “View” category.


And since I got some time to blog about toolbars configuration on visual studio, I also tend to add the “Solution Configurations” located under the “Build” category. It’s really helpful especially during the after sale service period when you debug the changes and then build a release for the client. I also enable the “Build” toolbar (right click in the toolbar area and select the Build option) which is helpful in order to cancel a build if F5 or build solution was accidentally pressed.
Happy coding!