Stupid IDE tricks

A question was asked the other day about “how can I list just all the Windows in my application” And that reminded me of something I added to the IDE some time back.

Advanced filters in the find field above the navigator. It has only a very short mention in the IDE user guide.

So if you want to find all the Windows in your application you can type something like this into the filter field

% type:Window

and press enter and you will see all windows and container controls listed (containers are window like objects hence why they are listed). You can use the type filter with just about any type you can imagine in your project; property, constant, enumeration, delegate, method and so on.

You can also put things in the type field that include wild cards. So if you want to see all properties, computed and regular, you can put

% type:%property

This will list any computedproperty or property, regardless of its name, in the navigator.

Combine this with a decent naming convention and you can make the filter work for you in a lot of ways I think a lot of people do not realize exists.