Today at the //build/ conference, Visual Studio 2013 was announced and shown in preview form (and download!). And once again, my group (well, my group plus our larger team) made the front page of visualstudio.com:
In Visual Studio 2013, when doing c# and vb, you’ll get extra “indicators” above your methods that give you kindof a “heads up display” of things about that class/method/property. The first one shows you references to the method, if you’re also using TFS it will show you which people have touched that method and in what changesets. Its tfs history on steroids! If you’re also using the built in unit testing features, that method will also show you an indicator that shows which tests test that method, and how many are pass/fail. If you click on any of the indicators, you’ll get a popup that shows you the details, and each details popup window has more useful info and actions you can do with that reference, or that changeset, or that unit test!
From the article at visualstudio.com:
Understanding what a line of code does is only part of your challenge as a developer. You must also understand its history, who worked on it, what code references it, and more. This becomes especially challenging in team-oriented projects. CodeLens (Code Information Indicators) in Visual Studio 2013 Preview uses information from both your project metadata and Team Foundation Server 2013 preview to place decorators on each of the methods in your code that show information such as what changesets led to the creation or recent change, who was the last person to work on the code, what unit tests cover the method (including the latest pass/fail state), and what code references exist. You can also quickly jump into that data, such as an associated changeset or referenced code file with just a click.
The larger ALM org (along with Matt and others from the VS language experience team!) was responsible for the plumbing that makes it work, my group was specifically responsible for the authors and changes indicators, and I did a lot of work to make that popup with the callout that points back to the originating indicator, among other things.
Edit 6/27/2013: There are even live msdn docs for codelens now!
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