In the recent update of Visual Studio 2010 productivity power tool  there are few new interesting features introduced.   You can download the Productivity tool from http://bit.ly/9nybU6 .  There are certain new features like Quick Find which allows you find and advance find dialog option with in code editor with nice highlighting features, nice enhancement of add reference window. kunal chowdhury has some nice blog post where he talked about  above two new productivity tool features. You can find the post over http://bit.ly/hDa0si and http://bit.ly/grhGAI . In this post I am going to talk about another nice and most interesting features of Power Productivity Tool which “Enhanced Scroll Mode”.  

Enhanced Scroll Mode enables a lot of stuff with in scroll bar.  Productivity tools has it own different setting section of the “Enhanced Scroll Mode”.  To navigate this , Tool > Option > Power Productivity Tool > Enhanced Scroll Mode

There are couple of interesting options that  you can find with the new scroll bar,  but I would like to talk few of them . Lets start with  “Track Change in Scroll Bar” .

Track Changes in Scroll Bar :

In one of my previous blog post I discussed about Color Indicator for Code Changes – Track Changes in Visual Studio 2010 , where I discussed about use of Track change and what is new in VS 2010 Track Change.

Now, Enhanced Scroll bar having the Track Change features inbuilt. So you can track change of your code in Scroll bar itself.

Now  you may think what is the advantages of this ? Or why do we need Track Change Indicator in two different places ?

Well, In my previous post of Track Change I mentioned , “Selection Margin” must need to be enabled for Track Change. So if you disabled the “Selection Margin”, Track change will be disabled automatically.

But, now in the current implementation, If you did the above settings, you can still view your Track Change details in Scroll Bar.

To Stop Track Change, you have to explicitly “Unchecked” the “Track Changes” Checkbox  from Tools > Options ? Text Editors > General

If you want to disable the Track change from Scroll bar, you have go to the settings of Enhanced Scroll bar settings.

Let’s have a quick Look at “Display Mode” of Scroll Bar.

Different Types of Display Mode :

In newly introduced Enhanced Scroll bar, having three different mode

1. Scroll bar Mode ( Default one )

2. Map Mode

3. Full Map Mode

Display mode of scroll bar will help you to navigate around the code easily. Now you can view Track Changes ( discussed earlier ), error, warning, cursor position, search result, bookmark  etc.  Using the display mode you can zoom the selected are to get a quick view.

These scroll bars are intelligent enough to indicates all the above mentioned point as I mentioned earlier. As for example, If you look at the below images, I searched for “dte”, and the code editor along with scroll bar highlighted the match area.

Another  advantages is you can scroll a less area to view the complete source code

You can customize the color of indication from the Customization window as per your requirements.

Moving Between Different Scroll  Modes

If you want to move between different scroll mode, just right click on the scroll bar and select the mode.

For more such features you can check here http://bit.ly/hlPmuW