Wow that was a long title, but here is how to get them to show up again.
If you use Microsoft Visual Studio for development for any period of time, you can get used to using those handy dropdown boxes to quickly “jump to” a method in the class file your are currently working in. If you are not familiar with this feature in Visual Studio, I recommend enabling it. It can increase your productivity as a developer, and helps you pop around your source code a lot faster than scrolling manually.
But what happens if they disappear?
One day after importing some custom settings to change my text editor syntax color theme, those two code navigating dropdown boxes disappeared (the two dropdown boxes highlighted in yellow in the above picture). I spent a half hour trying to figure out how to get them back.
I eventually gave up and resorted to just using the “Find” Ctrl+f shortcut key combination every time I wanted to navigate to a method. It seemed like I was getting used to it. It seemed like it was fast enough. But working in a large solution, it was very easy to forget what a function or property was named. It became counter-productive.
Finally after weeks of relying on Ctrl+f to navigate thru my source code, I got fed up. After searching thru the Tools>Options menu in Visual Studio, I FOUND IT!
Here’s what you have to do to get the dropdown boxes back that let you “jump to” and navigate thru your source code.
NOTE: This step-by-step process shown below uses Visual Studio 2008
1.) From your IDE’s top menu, go to Tools>Options…
2.) Expand ‘Text Editor’, click ‘All Languages’, and find the checkbox labeled ‘Navigation bar’. This checkbox is what determines if those dropdown boxes are displayed in your IDE.
3.) Check the ‘Navigation bar’ checkbox. Then click the ‘OK’ button.
4.) Now the dropdown boxes will be displayed in your IDE! If you have a file open in your environment, click on the dropdown box and find an item to “jump to” in your source code. All items in the list are sorted in alphabetic order.
5.) After choosing an item in the ‘Navigation bar’ dropdown box, the text editor will “jump to” that item automatically, saving you time.
No more manually scrolling or having to rely solely on Ctrl+f to find what you are looking for in your source code! Use it, abuse it, and increase your productivity as a developer!
Hope this tip helps someone out there.
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