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Visual Studio 2013 Preview: Options Dialog Changes

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In this post I’ll talk about a couple of changes to the Tools | Options dialog.  It may not be sexy but it’s actually a nice improvement that many developers can appreciate. So on to the goodness…

 

The Options dialog now includes a search box:

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It not only searches the left hand side of the dialog for keywords:

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But also searches the right hand side as well:

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(NOTE: It’s not actually searching the right hand side of the dialog but rather searching keywords that have been put in to cover most of the options available on the right hand side. You can easily test this by searching for the word “translation” which is clearly in the image above but yields no results when searched.)

 

This feature is a little redundant with the QuickLaunch feature (https://blogs.msdn.com/b/zainnab/archive/2012/06/26/visual-studio-2012-new-features-quick-launch.aspx) but is more localized so you can search from within the dialog. This makes it better for multiple option searches in my opinion.

 

Resize

Another cool option is the ability to (finally) resize the Options dialog so you can see more of the information. Simply got to any corner and resize the window to taste:

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Finally

So, again, nothing too sexy but some good, solid improvements to the Options dialog. Enjoy! :)

Comments

  • Anonymous
    July 02, 2013
    It's quite amazing how much joy a little resize handle can bring with it.

  • Anonymous
    July 02, 2013
    @Marcus Rangell: Also quite amazing how long it took to get this basic functionality added!

  • Anonymous
    July 02, 2013
    Marcus and Jon, I agree with both statements :) I spend a lot of time in this dialog for work and this blog so I'm definitely doing the happy dance on the resize option. Z

  • Anonymous
    July 14, 2013
    Wow it's taken ten years to add a resize handle... impressive.