WPF Editor in Visual Studio 2010

One of the feature of Visual Studio 2010 that I’m excited about is the revamped editor built on top of Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). For those who have worked on WPF knows that it is a very powerful and flexible platform and that is the reason why I’m excited about it because not only this introduce some good features in Visual Studio but it opens bunch of opportunities for future as well. And I am sure the next version of VS plus VS extensions will provide excellent features for application developers.

Further to extend editor features, now you don’t have to write VSPackage, instead you can use Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF). For more details, visit Visual Studio on MSDN.

So the one of the simple feature I like is of Zoom in and out 🙂 and that’s because while presenting on several events I need to increase the font or use magnifier but now I can just zoom in and zoom out using Ctrl + Mouse Scroll Up/down. So now I don’t have to do that

Zoom in to 177%	Zoom out to 61%

Also you will notice in the picture above that now on the bottom left of editor there is option to select zoom level from where you can also change the zooming factor.

Another feature I would like to mention here is the integration of Visual Studio extensions through Extension Manager. You will find Extension Manager in Tools –> Extension Manager

And what it does is that it connects with Extension Gallery on MSDN and allows you to search and download any extension that is available for Visual Studio including controls, templates etc. Some of them are free, some of them are shareware. So let’s go ahead and search one of the extension. As an example I have searched and downloaded “Image Insertion” extension. After download, Visual Studio will prompt you to restart to take effects. What this extension allows me to do is that drag and drop any image on the code as the screenshots depict below: