
For example, say you just used Go To Definition and now you want to go back to where you came from. Navigate Backward (Ctrl+minus) and Navigate Forward (Ctrl+Shift+minus) allow you to quickly move between places you’ve already been in your code. It’s great for diving into implementation details, especially when reading code.

It works for a variety of symbols, including methods, types, classes, members, and more. Go To Definition (F12) does what its name suggests: it takes you to the definition of a given symbol.
VISUAL 2010 FINDINFILES CODE
Call Hierarchy is great for navigating by code path or understanding relationships between functions. Each method, property, and constructor in the Calls To and Calls From nodes can also be expanded into its own Calls To and Calls From sub-nodes.

Invoking Call Hierarchy on a method, property, indexer, or constructor in the source code shows you a tree of all the calls to and from that method, property, etc. Call HierarchyĬall Hierarchy (Ctrl+ K, Ctrl+T), or right-click and choose “View Call Hierarchy”, helps you understand the flow of code execution in more complex solutions and projects (C# only).

file, type, and member names) matching your search terms. It’s a smart, incremental search that refines as you type and will find any symbols (e.g. For example, if you type Foo Bar instead of FooBar, Navigate To will still return useful results. It helps you locate items in your code by using “fuzzy” search capabilities. Navigate To (Ctrl+comma), new for Visual Studio 2010, is a powerful way to search, especially when you’re not sure exactly what you’re looking for. Press Ctrl+I again to move to the next result and Enter or Escape to end the search.
VISUAL 2010 FINDINFILES UPDATE
Your search term will appear in the status bar at the bottom of the screen and your search will update as you type. To use Incremental Search, just press Ctrl+I and start typing. It uses very little screen real estate, doesn’t cover up your code, and is great for quickly finding a piece of code in your current file. Incremental Search (Ctrl+I) is fast, lightweight, and interactive, allowing you to search for partial words and refine your search in real time. For Beta 2, you can change the highlight color in Tools->Options->Environment->Fonts and Colors by updating the background color for “Inactive Selected Text.” For RC and RTM, you’ll be able to customize the Find highlight using the background color for “Selected Text.” Incremental Search Good news: we’ve updated that color since Beta 2, so it will be a darker blue and hopefully easier to see in the Visual Studio 2010 RC and RTM. We’ve also heard feedback that the default Find highlight color, currently a pale blue, is difficult to see and makes it hard to quickly find the results of your search. To start a new search, just select your desired text in the editor and use Find Next Selected (Ctrl+F3) to jump to the next occurrence of that text. Want to use the Find feature without the dialog? Find Next (F3) will take you to the next occurrence of the text in the toolbar’s Find combo box, which is usually your most recent search term.

With such a wide variety of options, we thought it would help to describe many of VS 2010’s code search and navigation features, from old favorites to new additions, in one place: Find and Replace We’ve added several new features for code search and navigation in Visual Studio 2010, including Navigate To and an improved Call Hierarchy, to complement search staples like the Find and Replace dialog and Incremental Search. Every developer knows that navigating code is vital to happy and productive coding.
