One of the small, but useful, features that I find myself
using a lot with the extensions is the "Ctrl + Click” go to definition
feature.
For those of you who haven’t tried it, it enables you to
quickly navigate to the definition of a member or type within your code.
You can accomplish the same behavior out of the box with Visual Studio by
right-clicking on a member/type and then choosing the “Go to Definition”
context menu item – or by moving your cursor over a type/member and then
pressing the F12 key. But for some reason I’ve found the Ctrl+Click
gesture provided by the VS 2010 Power Tool Extensions more natural and faster to
use (since for my keyboard the F12 key requires a split-second extra finger
move to use – whereas the control key is always in easy reach).
To try out the “Ctrl+Click” behavior, just hold down the
“Ctrl” key and use your mouse to hover over a type or member in your
code. When the extension is enabled you’ll find that this causes a
hyperlink to appear under each type/member you hover over:
Clicking the hyperlink will immediately navigate you to the
definition of the type/member within your code:
Note that the “go-to-definition” feature in VS can also be
used on a type that you don’t have source access to. For example, like
with the DbSet<T> collection I used in my EF “code-first” blog post yesterday:
When you click a type referenced from a binary library, VS
will automatically generate a class definition based on the signature compiled
into the assembly: