I found this function totally accidentally when I knocked my mouse into a key when something interesting popped up on Twitter. I happened to have a variable selected like so: Variable Selected in Visual Studio The key that I knocked was the Number Pad “+” key, and it expanded the selection like this: VariableSelectedPlus1 As any self respecting Systems Administrator would do I wondered if doing exactly the same thing repeatedly would have equal or compound effects. VariableSelectedAgainAgain Strangely enough it worked, the selection will continue to expand selecting increasingly larger sections of code. The reverse works as well if you press the Number Pad “-” key the selection will be reduced.

WhatHappened

As I was looking for documentation on this function; I found that you could use the CamelCase select function to start selections off using Ctrl+Shift+Left (or Ctrl+Shift+Right) this will take your selection from the current cursor position to the next upper case character to the left (or right). This can be coupled with the Number Pad “+” to expand your selection from a variable to an expression, to a line then a block. Neat! Each of these discoveries was announced with a handy little popup in the bottom right hand corner of the viewport telling me what happened, and if relevant what function was suppressed. I am going to make a concerted effort to spend my lunch break watching some more videos on DevExpress' training site. I got 10 minutes today and watched what appeared to be footage from a launch event or a conference which was interesting but didn’t really teach me anything specifically.