Showing results for IDE - Visual Basic Blog

Do you use code snippets (introduced in VB 2005)? If you do, then you've probably noticed the green highlighting that stays around for the lifetime of the file. We've heard *a lot* of feedback that once you are done customizing the snippet, it is distracting to see this highlighting stay around. To address this, VB 2008 has improved the heuristics ...

  One of the things we have been working on recently was publishing sources of VisualBasic runtime library. I am very excited to announce that the sources of VB runtime (Microsoft.VisualBasic.dll) are publicly available now!  This is a part of a more general work on making .Net Framework sources available to public ( http...

Our goal in designing VB2008 IntelliSense was to make users of the feature the most productive that they could be. One problem we found in watching people use the feature, is that sometimes intelliSense displays so many items that it is hard to know whether or not you're close to the item you're looking for. You basically have to read them all of ...

There's a lot of cool functionality built into VS debugger datatips that often goes unnoticed... For example, did you know that not only can you *see* values in the expanded datatips, but you can also edit them? Watch the following walk-through... While debugging, hover over a variable to view its debugger datatip: Next press the '+' to expand the...

Just like Alt+Tab for Windows you can use Ctrl+Tab for Visual Studio. Ctrl+Tab will show you the active tool windows *and* the active files, so it is a good navigation tool for both. VS2008 has even added a cool miniature-sized visualization to this view, so that you can better determine which item you're after. Windows: Visual Studio:  ...

With the help of one little hotkey, you can now make the VS2008 IntelliSense list transparent! Just press CTRL. This is especially convenient when you need to see the code underneath the list. Watch it in action :)  ...

I've decided to start a "Did you know?" series with tips & tricks. First off is my favorite IDE feature in VB2008: IntelliSense Everywhere! Did you know about all the new places where you can now find intelliSense in VB2008? If you're like me, once you try 2008 IntelliSense you won't be able to go back to 2005. VB's mission statement is to be ...

I released a Channel 9 screencast with Lisa Feigenbaum, PM on the VB Team where she shows us how to use Refactor!, the free add-in for Visual Studio 2005 and 2008 that provides over 30 refactorings for Visual Basic. Lisa walks us through all the new refactorings that were added for the latest version of Visual Basic 2008. You can download Refactor...

Visual Studio has a small but extremely useful feature that allows you to hook external tools directly into the IDE’s Tools menu.  All you have to do is click Tools->External Tools… and then you can add your own custom menu items that will launch a specified program.   On a typical day I’ll probably fire up Reflector and/or ...

Yesterday I promised to post about the hidden gems in Visual Basic and Visual Studio 2008 that you haven’t read about in blog posts or seen at conferences. I forgot that I mentioned a few of my favorite features in the Beta1 announcement where I showed off the improvements in the Intellisense experience – statement completion for ...