Navigate To is a great feature that lets you search and navigate to symbols especially when you are not sure for what exactly you are searching for. You can open up ‘Navigate To’ dialog either from menu Edit -> Navigate To or using shortcut Ctrl + , (comma).
For example, consider we are looking for controller for shopping cart but not exactly sure of what were the name. So we what we can do we write “cart” “controller”, for which it would come up with matching results containing ‘ShoppingCartController’ which is exactly we were looking for.
Note: For this blog post I have used MvcMusicStore, an open source project for ASP.NET MVC to demonstrate feature
Few things to remember:
- The results does not include namespaces or local variables however it may include definition, file names etc.
- A search string is case-sensitive, if search term has character in uppercase otherwise it would be case-insensitive
As a developer, it’s better for me to avoid mouse intervention and perform quick navigation. Now if I want to jump to any file, I can quickly open up the code element I want to edit using Ctrl+, (comma) and typing the file name. This is fast and saves a lot of time in avoiding scrolling through solution explorer especially when you have many projects as part of your solution.
“Navigate To” feature was first shipped with VS 2010 however I have observed that many experienced developers are not utilizing this feature to increase their everyday productivity.
So gets your hands on this feature and start using Ctrl + (comma) for search or quick navigation to different types and its symbols.
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