Visual Studio 2012 New Features of the IDE

In this post, we will look at some of the new features of Visual Studio 2012’s IDE.

Dark Color Theme for Code Editor and IDE window:
Visual Studio 2012 provides out of the box option to have a White on Black color scheme, Dark AKA White on Black color schemes have become choice of many developers as many have realized that they are easy on the eyes.


Quick Launch - Search the VS commands / menu options:
Seems Visual Studio has more than 4000 commands, apart from the frequently used commands, it wouldn't be practical to remember most of the commands, hence Visual Studio 2012 has a cool feature called Quick Launch - Ctrl+Q located in the top right corner in the Visual Studio 2012 IDE. You can start typing few letters of the command you are looking for and Quick Launch will provide auto-suggest with commands that starts with the letters you have typed. It shows the shortcut keys for each command which is pretty neat.

Pinned TAB:
This is a feature found in Productivity Power Tools for Visual Studio 2010 and Productivity Power Tools for Visual Studio 2012  this allows you to pin tabs that you want to remain open and easily accessible. When you pin a tab it is stuck to the left most corner of the tab-well.

Search option in IDE windows:
Many of the windows in Visual Studio 2012 will have a search option including Solution Explorer and Toolbox.

Find and Replace window:
A minimalistic approach has been taken in designing the new find window present in Visual Studio 2012. The advantage is that the find window will not hide the code window much. Some may miss the old find window which shows shortcuts to turn on/off options like Match Case, Match whole word, etc. This resembles the search option found in modern browsers.

Preview TAB:
Visual Studio 2012 provides you a preview of a file when you select it in the Solution Explorer. Earlier if you want to examine the file contents of a file, you have to open it and see, if you are trying to locate something (and if you can’t use find command for some reason) then you would have opened a lot of files messing up the workspace with lot of open tabs. Now with this preview tab, when you select a file it is opened and placed in the right corner of the tab-well as shown below and when you select another file the currently selected file’s content is shown in the same preview tab. If you want to keep the file open in a normal tab instead of showing in the preview tab then you can click the Keep Open icon.

This preview tab feature also gives you another behavior which helps you to keep the IDE clean with only the files you like to keep open. Whenever you are debugging and stepping into your code Visual Studio will open other files when there is a chunk of code that is called by your main program file, and if there are lot of files involved then all of them are opened in the end of your debugging (stepping through) session. Now in Visual Studio 2012, the preview tab is utilized when you step through the code for which another file has to be loaded, once the other file’s statements are completed then the preview tab is automatically closed.

Browser Drop Down:
The browser drop down shown below provides a quick way to start your ASP.NET web application on any of the browsers installed on your machine, earlier you’d have to do this via other not-so-quick menu/context menu commands.

Create Multiple Solution Explorer Instances:
Nowadays, in most solutions you work on, the number of projects present are many, but you work only with few of them depending upon the role you play in the project. Visual Studio 2012 gives you a new feature of creating Solution explorer instances showing only a project or folder containing a set of files when you right click them as shown below.

Page Inspector:
Page inspector is another new feature in Visual Studio 2012, it allows you to examine the html/css of a web page similar to IE Developer Tool Bar or Firefox’s Firebug add-on. You can inspect a HTML element’s HTML and CSS, make edits and try out how it will look in the browser on the fly.

IIS Express replaces ASP.Net Development Server:
In Visual Studio 2012, IIS Express replaces the ASP.NET Development server, more about IIS Express here. 

HTML 5 and CSS 3 Support:
The Visual Studio 2012 editor supports development of HTML 5 and CSS 3 web sites by providing appropriate intellisense and code snippets. 

Unmodified VS 2010 Project files:
Visual Studio 2010(SP1) project files are not converted when opened in Visual Studio 2012. So if some of your team members use Visual Studio 2010 and you use Visual Studio 2012 for some reason, then you all can share the same solution/project file without converting to Visual Studio 2012’s project file format. 



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Data Bound Controls in ASP.Net - Part 4 (FormView and DetailsView controls)

FormView The FormView control is used to display a single record from a data source. It is similar to the DetailsView control, except it displays user-defined templates instead of row fields. Creating your own templates gives you greater flexibility in controlling how the data is displayed. The FormView control supports the following features: ·          Binding to data source controls, such as SqlDataSource and ObjectDataSource. ·          Built-in inserting, updating and deleting capabilities. ·          Built-in paging capabilities. ·          Programmatic access to the FormView object model to dynamically set properties, handle events, and so on. ·          Customizable appearance through user-defined templates, themes, and styles. Templates For the FormView control to display content, you need to create templates for the different parts of the control. Most templates are optional; however, you must create a template for the mode in which the control is configur
Read more

ASP.net: HttpHandlers

Image
HTTPHandlers: ASP.NET handles all the HTTP requests coming from the user and generates the appropriate response for it. ASP.NET framework knows how to process different kind of requests based on extension. For example, it can handle request for .aspx , .ascx and .txt files, etc. When it receives any request, it checks the extension to see if it can handle that request and performs some predefined steps to serve that request. ASP.NET provides a low-level request/response API that enables developers to use .NET Framework classes to service incoming HTTP requests.So as a developer, One might want to handle some new kind of requests such as requests for .jpg or .gif. ASP.NET provides HTTPHandler to handle requests for .jpg or .gif. An ASP.NET HTTP handler is the process or endpoint that runs in response to a request made to an ASP.NET Web application. The most common handler is an ASP.NET page handler that processes .aspx files. When users request an .aspx file, the requ
Read more

The Clickjacking attack and X-Frame-Options

Clickjacking  Clickjacking is a type of “web framing” or “UI redressing” attack. What that simply means in practice is that: 1. A user (victim) is shown an innocuous, but enticing web page (think watch online video) 2. Another web page (that generally does something important – think add friends on social network) is layered on top of the first page and set to be transparent 3. When the user thinks they are clicking on the web page they see (video), they are actually clicking on the higher layered (framed) page that is transparent There are two main ways to prevent clickjacking: 1.     Sending the proper X-Frame-Options HTTP response headers that instruct the browser to not allow framing from other domains 2.     Employing defensive code in the UI to ensure that the current frame is the most top level window Using X-Frame-Options X-Frame-Options  originally invented by Microsoft for IE8, but supported by a number of browsers, this idea might have more
Read more