Visual Studio 2015 comes with many new features and improvements in the IDE, the debugger or language compilers. Obviously, there are more than three things I like in the new IDE, but three things have caught my attention from the very beginning.
The Error Window
One of the things that bothered me the most about the error window was the mixture of errors/warnings/messages from both MSBuild and IntelliSense. But I don’t usually care about the later and their presence in the error window is usually annoying me. This is now fixed and you can select to see messages from Build, IntelliSense or both.
In addition to this you can apply even more filtering:
- You can select the source of the messages: Entire Solution, Current Project, Open Documents or Current Document.
- You can search the error list, and the search includes the text in all the output list columns (Code, Description, Project, File or Line).
- You can individually show or hide Errors, Warnings and Message (but this feature has been available for many years).
The Find in Files Append
I’m working with large source bases and I often need to do find in files, usually going from search to search until I find what I need. The problem was there were only two output windows for the search results and when you need to do a 3rd you had to discard one of the previous searches while you might still needed the results. I have requested for many years that Visual Studio should support more than two find results windows. I actually created a User Voice request a few years ago.
In Visual Studio 2015 they have implemented an append feature, were you could append your search results to one of the existing two windows.
As a result the old search results are not discarded, but aggregated in a the form of a tree list in the search results window.
Though this is not what exactly I was expecting it provides the feature I was looking for with probably minimal changes to the Visual Studio IDE.
The Inline Create Definition (for C++)
I’m not sure how this feature is actually called, but what it does is creating a definition for a function in the source file from the declaration in the header and displays it in a boxed document inside the header document. Here is an example:
You declare a function/method in a header file. Visual Studio figures out the definition is missing.
Use the Quick Actions (CTRL + .) to create a definition of the symbol in the source file.
The definition is added to the source file that is opened as a document in a box just below the function declaration.
I find this very useful to get going with a new function. Of course for writing larger functions you’ll probably switch to the actual document tab where the source file is opened.
With these new features only Visual Studio has become much more productive for me. And there are plenty more.
For the “Inline Create Definition” you can select more than one method definition in your header.
It also works to implements pure virtual interfaces (Implements pure virtuals for base ‘Ixxx’ )