In earlier versions of Visual Studio, if you happened to mess up your window layout in Visual Studio, you could reset it back to the default layout by using the appropriate item in the Window menu:

This rearranges the docked windows to whatever you originally had when Visual Studio was installed:

That’s nice and all. But you may have noticed some new items above “Reset Window Layout” in the Window menu which are pretty handy when it comes to managing your window layouts.

For instance, when developing a new WPF application, the toolbox can sometimes come in handy for those without much experience with XAML. So, after introducing the Toolbox window, you can save the current layout:

To save a layout, you need to give it a name:

…and if that name happens to already exist, you’re asked whether you want to replace it (this is how you update saved layouts):

You can then load (apply) these layouts by selecting them from the list in the Window menu, or by using the appropriate shortcut key (available for the first nine layouts in order). For instance, I saved this alternate layout suitable for unit tests, and I can apply it like this:

…and then, like magic, the selected layout is applied:

There’s also a menu item for management of these layouts:

This opens a dialog which allows you to rename, delete, or reorder layouts.

Reordering layouts has the effect of reassigning their keyboard shortcuts, since they are assigned in order to the first nine (from Ctrl+Alt+1 to Ctrl+Alt+9).

So, there you have it! Window layout management is yet another new feature in Visual Studio 2015 to improve your productivity.

In Visual Studio 2015, the new C# and VB .NET compilers are based on the .NET Compiler Platform known as Roslyn. This allows third-party tools to use the compiler itself to query the structure of code, rather than having to redo the compiler’s job. It also provides the ability to fix the code by modifying its structure.

You can use the NuGet Package Manager in VS2015 to install analyzers. At the moment there are very few available, and they’re still prerelease software. For this demonstration we’ll use the CodeCracker C# analyzer:

Once you install the package, you’ll see that the analyzer has been added under a special Analyzers node under the References in Solution Explorer. If you expand the analyzer, you can see all the rules that it enforces:

As you can see, the code analysis rules may be enforced at various levels. Those marked as errors will result in actual compiler errors, and obviously cause the build to fail.

The rules that are broken by the code will then show up in the error list, which in VS2015 has been enhanced so that you can see more info about the error/rule and also click on the error code link to go to its online documentation (at the time of writing this article, the CodeCracker’s error code links are broken):

The best thing about live static code analysis is that they’re live: the rules will be checked as you’re writing your code, and you don’t even need to build for them to be evaulated.

Warnings may be sorted out by moving the caret within the relevant code and pressing Ctrl+. (Control Dot), after which the Quick Actions become available. See, code analyzers don’t need to limit themselves to complaining. If a fix is available, you’ll have the option to apply it, and you can preview the changes as with any other refactoring:

If you know better than the code analyzer, you can opt to suppress the warning instead:

Code analysis allows rules to be enforced on your team’s code. Roslyn facilitates this by making it easy to plug in different code analyzers (and hopefully in future there will be a wider range to choose from) and by running code analysis live, without the need to build the project.

Note: this demonstration used the CodeCracker C# analyzer in order to show the different levels of rules (e.g. warnings, errors, etc), since the StyleCop analyzer’s rules are all warnings. The CodeCracker C# analyzer is in quite a mess at the time of writing, with missing fixes, broken rule documentation links, and countless grammatical errors. But it’s prerelease, so we’ll pretend that’s a good excuse and forgive it for its sins.

Visual Studio 2015 brings two new refactorings: Introduce Local Variable, and Inline Temporary Variable.

Inline Temporary Variable is actually the exact opposite of Introduce Local Variable. At times you’ll be using a variable for something so simple that it actually clutters the code. For example:

var firstArgument = args[0];
Console.WriteLine(firstArgument);

We can get rid of the firstArgument variable by using the Inline Temporary Variable refactoring.

To do this, we first need to select the firstArgument variable on the first line (where it is being declared), and then press Ctrl+. (Control Dot) or select “Quick Actions…” from the context menu after right-clicking the selection. This brings up the refactorings menu, from which we can select the refactoring we want:

After selecting the Inline Temporary Variable refactoring from the menu, the code gets cleaned up pretty nicely:

Console.WriteLine(args[0]);

There are two new refactorings introduced in Visual Studio 2015. The first of these allows you to introduce a local variable to simplify your code. Let’s see this at work on some source code from ImapTalk.

After selecting some code, press Ctrl+. (Control Dot) or select “Quick Actions…” after right-clicking on the selected code. You’ll get a list of refactorings that you can apply to your code, along with a nifty preview of what your code will look like after it is applied:

In this code I’ve got this Color object that I’m passing directly into the constructor of a SolidColorBrush, which looks a bit messy. With this refactoring, I’ll introduce a local variable to hold that Color, and then pass the new variable into the SolidColorBrush:

Once you select this refactoring, Visual Studio goes into inline rename mode, so that you can choose the name of the new variable.

Take a look at the refactored code above. Much better! 🙂