Tips
Find in Solution Explorer
New feature as part of StudioTools today, this is available on the experimental updates version 2180 and higher.
It does what I’d hope you’d expect, finding the current file in Solution Explorer for you, focusing Solution Explorer and highlighting the file. Very handy in Solutions with a large number of files or when you are ‘new’ to a codebase. Enjoy.
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Auto-Install Restore
When files are pulled from the auto-install, they land into
C:\Users\Setup\AppData\Local\ExactMagic\install
and when they are finally installed (on your next Visual Studio startup) they are archived into
C:\Users\Setup\AppData\Local\ExactMagic\installed
Now, it is possible if you have a TestMatrixDebugShim.exe running (orphaned really) by a Visual Studio crash, that you’ll need to… ‘redo’ an auto update. Simply copy the contents on ‘installed’ to ‘install’ and restart Visual Studio.
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Tracking Exceptions while Testing
Tracking exceptions up the Call Trace lets you see where a test failure starts and to visually see how far an exception ‘leaks’ up your call stack before being handled.
The little indicates which calls exited via an exception, as opposed to exiting normally out the bottom of the function, or through a return.
You can double click on any call in the Trace and navigate there in the editor. And — you’ll see the error fingers in the gutter if this exception exited all the way out of your test case.
You can right click on the fingers and navigate up and down the exception stack trace. This feature is available even without profiling being on, as it intercepts exceptions coming out of the test engines and saves that metadata along with the test. Very handy for tracking down why a test failed.
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Disabling the Spell Check Feature
This question has come up a lot recently. Some people love the integrated spell checking, others hate it. The number one comment we get regarding this feature is the flagging of variable names as spelling errors.
The reasoning here was that variable names should be meaningful words, rather than abbreviations or random letters. This produces more meaningful code that is easier to read. The spell check engine is smart enough to understand camel case, so standard programmer idioms can still be applied. However, realizing that this isn’t for everyone, you do have a couple of options. To configure spell checking, bring up the options panel for Studio Tools from the Visual Studio menu:
Tools | Options
First, you can set Comments Only to true, disabling spell checking inside the code itself.
Alternatively, you can set As-You-Type Spell Checking to false to disable it all together.
You can always execute a manual spell check from the Studio Tools | Spelling menu.
Hopefully this clears up some confusion. We’d love your comments on this feature. For example, should the default state be to only spell check inside of comments? Are there other rules we should teach the engine about that would make the code level spell checking more useful?
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