My new favorite feature of Visual Studio: the Class View search box. Ever been working on a large solution with hundreds of files, looking for a file that you know is there, but can’t remember which project its in? You know the name of the file, but can’t remember where its at. I needed a way to be able to search my solution for a file name. Voila! Ctrl + K, Ctrl + V pops open the Class View and puts the focus in the search box and lets you search for the class you need. The only caveat is that it searches through the .NET framework assemblies too, so it can be moderately slow at times, but I’ve not noticed a real problem with that so far. I’ve never had a search take longer than maybe a couple of seconds. Anyway…I found it very useful…though you might too.

Scott Hanselman:

In a recent MVC design meeting someone said something like “we’ll need a Repeater control” and a powerful and very technical boss-type said:

“We’ve got a repeater control, it’s called a foreach loop.”

That is EXACTLY the kind of thinking that has me so excited about the MVC extensions to ASP.NET.

At a previous job I was on, we made pretty heavy use of a tracer class that was really helpful for debugging and performance tuning. By injecting some trace commands in your code at the beginning and end of operations that you wanted to analyze, and flipping a switch in the application config file, the tool would generate a nice, indented/formatted output to your Visual Studio output window that would give you a nice, easy way to see exactly what was going on in your code at runtime. Since I left that job, on several occasions I’ve thought how nice it would be to have something like that available to use again.

I recently downloaded and installed a nice little utility that I’ve used off-and-on for a long time now called the Snippet Compiler by Jeff Key. That guy just cranks stuff out left and right. He’s got all kinds of little time-saving utilities for monotonous tasks that a lot of developers do all the time. So, after I downloaded the Snippet Compiler (recommended), I was browsing through all of the other stuff that he had, and lo and behold, he has a tracer assembly available for download. From the looks of his write-up on it, it looks to be just like the one I’d used previously, only better…as it looks to output even more details about what’s going on in the code. Very, very nice. And of course, like most of his other utilities, its free and source code is provided in case you want to see how it works or do any tweaking to suit your own needs. Thanks Jeff. Keep up the great work.