Track Changes and Advance Scroll Mode in Visual Studio 2010

In the recent update of Visual Studio 2010 productivity power tool, there are few new interesting features introduced. You can download the Productivity tool from http://bit.ly/9nybU6. There are certain new features like Quick Find which allow you find and advance find dialog options with in code editor with nice highlighting features, nice enhancement of add reference window. Kunal Chowdhury has a nice blog post where he talked about above two new productivity tool features. You can find the post over at http://bit.ly/hDa0si and http://bit.ly/grhGAI. In this post, I am going to talk about another nice and most interesting features of Power Productivity Tool which is “Enhanced Scroll Mode”. 

Enhanced Scroll Mode enables a lot of stuff within scroll bar. Productivity tools has it own different setting section of the “Enhanced Scroll Mode”. To navigate this, Tool > Option > Power Productivity Tool > Enhanced Scroll Mode.

There are couple of interesting options that you can find with the new scroll bar, but I would like to talk about few of them. Let's start with “Track Changes in Scroll Bar” .

Track Changes in Scroll Bar

In one of my previous blog posts, I discussed about Color Indicator for Code Changes – Track Changes in Visual Studio 2010, where I discussed about use of Track change and what is new in VS 2010 Track Change.

Now, Enhanced Scroll bar having the Track Change features is inbuilt. So you can track change of your code in the Scrollbar itself.

Now you may think what is the advantages of this? Or why do we need to Track Change Indicator in two different places ?

Well, in my previous post of Track Change, I mentioned, “Selection Margin” must need to be enabled for Track Change. So if you disabled the “Selection Margin”, Track change will be disabled automatically.

But, now in the current implementation, if you did the above settings, you can still view your Track Change details in Scroll Bar.

To stop Track Change, you have to explicitly “Uncheck” the “Track Changes” Checkbox from Tools > Options ? Text Editors > General.

If you want to disable the Track change from Scroll bar, you have go to the settings of Enhanced Scroll bar settings.

Let’s have a quick Look at “Display Mode” of Scroll Bar.

Different Types of Display Mode

In the newly introduced Enhanced Scroll bar having three different modes:

1. Scroll bar Mode (Default one)
2. Map Mode
3. Full Map Mode

Display mode of scroll bar will help you to navigate around the code easily. Now you can view Track Changes (discussed earlier), error, warning, cursor position, search result, bookmark, etc. Using the display mode, you can zoom the selected one to get a quick view.

These scroll bars are intelligent enough to indicate all the above mentioned points as I mentioned earlier. As for example, if you look at the below images, I searched for “dte”, and the code editor along with scroll bar highlighted the match area.

Another advantage is that you can scroll a lesser area to view the complete source code:

You can customize the color of indication from the Customization window as per your requirements.

Moving Between Different Scroll Modes

If you want to move between different scroll modes, just right click on the scroll bar and select the mode.

For more such features, you can check here http://bit.ly/hlPmuW.