Code Lens ~ Cool Feature in VS 2013

Hi All,

Here I have come with a new technical post on the cool feature “Code Lens”, introduced in Visual Studio 2013. This is an awesome feature and I wanted to share this with you all.

Code Lens is a new feature in Visual Studio 2013 to show information about your code in the code editor. Code information includes method references, tests associated with the method, code change history and the number of times the code has been changed. This leads to moving away from code editor and with code lens you can have the information displayed just by hovering over the code.

By default it is on in visual studio 2013 but we do have control over the information to be displayed. This you can do with the help of code information indicators in the options menu. In the previous versions, we right click on a method or with SHIFT +F12 we could see all the method references in another window, whereas with the availability of code lens, the references will be displayed just with the mouse hovering on the method.

Some of the cool features in code lens are below,

• It displays authors who have recently made changes in the code.
• It also displays number of change sets related to this method which on clicking provides the complete information of change sets.
• It displays the number of tests that the method has been going through and with the tests running the code lens updates the test information.

This is one kind of a feature that every developer will welcome as it causes no burden in getting the code information in the code editor itself.

Following this, I have another introduction post on “Team Rooms“, a new feature in TFS 2013.