Visual Studio 2013 Support in ReSharper 8.1
This year we’ve seen something unprecedented: the release cycle for Visual Studio has shrunk to just one year, and Visual Studio 2013 came out with some pretty serious improvements across the board. ReSharper, as you can imagine, always tries to provide a seamless development experience, so in ReSharper 8.1 we’ve added support for two VS2013-specific features: peek definition and the enhanced scroll bar.
Peek Definition
Just in case you haven’t seen it, the Peek Definition feature of VS2013 allows you to peek into the source code of a referenced entity right in the current editor window, without opening new tabs, simply by having the cursor on the piece of code you want to investigate and pressing Alt+F12:
ReSharper treats this ‘inset’ editor window as it would any other, so that navigation facilities (including the ability to show and navigate decompiled code) function just as they do in an ordinary editor window, with the exception that any code navigated to is also shown in the editor rather than in a separate tab:
ReSharper also uses the Peek Definition API for large result sets obtained from features such as Find Usages. These are shown on the right hand side of the peek definition window:
Finally, to make it even more convenient, we’ve added additional Ctrl-click shortcuts for more convenient navigation. Peek Definition can now be invoked by clicking while pressing Ctrl+Shift, and Go to Implementation can now be invoked by clicking with Ctrl+Alt.
Enhanced Scroll Bar
Visual Studio 2013 comes with an enhanced scroll bar — the vertical scroll bar area is now used not just to indicate position within the document, but also to indicate locations of code elements, Peek Definition windows, and so on.
ReSharper 8.1 integrates its own marker bar (previosly shown as a separate vertical area right next to the scroll bar) to show its errors on this new enhanced scroll bar. Here’s what it looks like:
ReSharper now uses the scrollbar to indicate errors, warnings, hints and suggestions. The horizontal markers are, as always, clickable (a click takes you to the offending line of code) and have tooltips describing the issue at hand.
If, for some reason, you want the old marker bar back, we give you this option, too. Simply open up ReSharper’s Options dialog and go to Environment | Editor | Editor Appearance and at the very bottom of the screen you should see the following settings:
The options here are fairly self-explanatory:
- Do not show error stripe hides the error stripe completely.
- Show error stripe bar shows the pre-VS2013 implementation of the marker bar as a separate bar. Choose this if you prefer the way things were in ReSharper 8.0 and earlier.
- Show marks over enhanced scroll bar is the option for integrating with the VS2013 scroll bar. If you choose this, you can also decide how big you want the error marks on this scroll bar to appear: we give you three settings to choose from.
So with that in mind, we hope you enjoy having ReSharper 8.1 work in tandem with Visual Studio 2013. While we’re getting the final release version ready, check out ReSharper 8.1 EAP builds and let us know what you think!
