I was taking a look at working with a WPF application the other day when I found, what I thought, was a really neat feature of Visual Studio 2008.
What I came across was the “Search” feature that is built into the Properties window of my WPF application. It was quite by accident that I found the search ability because I could not find the property of a control that I was trying to change. I knew the property existed, but for the life of me I could not find it.
If your display is like mine, when I look at the property window in Visual Studio, there are more properties than can be shown on the screen so the scroll out of sight.
Getting to a property, or finding the property as was my case, is much easier if you make use of the property windows search feature.
As you type in the search box, Visual Studio filters the properties of the Control to show only the properties that contain the letter(s) that you enter into the search box.
So if, for example, you want to quickly find the width property. When you type “w” into the search box, the list of properties is narrowed down.
Add an “i” into the search box and the list is filtered even more,
and so on if you want to keep going and type in the whole name of the property.
While this may not always be the quickest way to find a property, I thought it was a nifty addition to Visual Studio 2008.