.NET Tips and Tricks

Blog archive

Seeing a File Twice in Visual Studio

You want to compare/view two parts of the same file at the same time. You have two choices for making this happen.

First, you can click on the divider bar at the top of the scroll bar on the right side of your editor window. Dragging that bar down divides your code window into two panes (one on top of the other), which you can scroll through independently.

However, each of these panes is now smaller than the original window. If you want to see your code in a full-size window then go to the Window menu and select New Window. You'll get a second window with the same name but with ":1" tacked on the end (for example, "Customer.cs" and "Customer.cs:1"). If you want, you can drag one of the tabs to another monitor (something you can't do with the divider bar).

Either way, changes you make in one window/pane automatically appear in the other window/pane.

If you're using Visual Studio 2010, this feature is turned off for some languages (the team ran out of time to completely test it). You'll need to make a change to your Windows Registry to turn it on.

Posted by Peter Vogel on 01/14/2016


comments powered by Disqus

Featured

  • VS Code Copilot Previews New GPT-4o AI Code Completion Model

    The 4o upgrade includes additional training on more than 275,000 high-quality public repositories in over 30 popular programming languages, said Microsoft-owned GitHub, which created the original "AI pair programmer" years ago.

  • Microsoft's Rust Embrace Continues with Azure SDK Beta

    "Rust's strong type system and ownership model help prevent common programming errors such as null pointer dereferencing and buffer overflows, leading to more secure and stable code."

  • Xcode IDE from Microsoft Archrival Apple Gets Copilot AI

    Just after expanding the reach of its Copilot AI coding assistant to the open-source Eclipse IDE, Microsoft showcased how it's going even further, providing details about a preview version for the Xcode IDE from archrival Apple.

  • Introduction to .NET Aspire

    Two Microsoft experts will present on the cloud-native application stack designed to simplify the development of distributed systems in .NET at the Visual Studio Live! developer conference coming to Las Vegas next month.

  • Microsoft Previews Copilot AI for Open-Source Eclipse IDE

    Catering to Java jockeys, Microsoft is yet again expanding the sprawling reach of its Copilot-branded AI assistants, previewing a coding tool for the open-source Eclipse IDE.

Subscribe on YouTube

Upcoming Training Events