What I Love So Far With Visual Studio

I have used Visual Studio 11 since it was released in beta and I must say I like it. I wanted to write down my favorite features here both to remind myself about them and to maybe give any of you random readers some tips.

HTML Editor / ASP.Net

• You can now generate a event handler directly from the design source view. Before you had to go to the design view or use the “tab tab” feature in the code view to auto generate an event handler. Now you can do it from the asp server tag itself.
• Just as you can extract a method via the refactor context menu in the code editor you can now Extract a user control from the HTML view. So if you have a chunk of HTML that you feel would fit better in a user control you can just select it all, right click on it and choose to extract as a user control. VS will then create the new user control, reference it in the document and insert a tag for it. You have to move any code that reference any of the elements that you extracted manually though.
• If you change a a HTML tag in VS11 it will now also change the closing tag. It’s strange that this hasn’t been there before but I’m glad they finally added it.

CSS Editor

• I’m a CTRL K+D junkie and use it all the time to format my code. What bugged the hell out of me before was that in a CSS file the editor always scrolled up to the top of the document when i did this. It doesn’t do that anymore. In relation to this VS11 also intend CSS based on class. So .header h1 will get intended below .header.
• As much as I use the shortcut to format my document i use CTRL K+C  and CTRL K+U to comment and uncomment my code. This did not work in CSS files before but works now.
• I use border-radius and some other CSS3 features a lot and since some browsers requires vendor specific prefix for these it’s always a mess to have to write -moz-bla-bla and -webkit-bla-bla and so on. If you type border-radius in the Visual Studio 11 editor and then press tab twice it will automatically create these.

Page Inspector

The Page Inspector they added in Visual Studio 11 is just brilliant! It’s like Firebug but instead of seeing your generated HTML when you inspect elements, you see the actual server-side code that generates a specific element on your site. And it also works with CSS! No more hacking in Firebug to make something looks good and then remember what you changed and save it in the actual file and so on. As I said, it’s just brilliant! Right-click on the project and choose “View in Page Inspector” to use it!