A minor formatting nicety in Visual Studio 2005

While working in Visual Studio 2005, I noticed a cool Autoformat-like behavior provided by the IDE.

I was working in a class that had a private class constant declared that I wanted to change to have public instead of private visibility. The original code looked something like: private const int MaxItems = 5; I used the ctrl+rightArrow keyboard shortcut to select a nearby instance of the keyword public, and then hit ctrl+c (Clipboard Copy), so I ended up with "public " (including the trailing space) on the clipboard.

I then double-clicked the instance of the "private" keyword that I wanted to replace to select it, and pressed ctrl+v to do the paste.

After the paste, the result was: public const int MaxItems = 5; This struck me as odd for some reason. After thinking about it briefly, I realized that I should have been left with an extra space after "public", due to the trailing space that was present on the clipboard: public  const int MaxItems = 5;

However, Visual Studio recognized what I was doing, and automatically removed the extra space for me, saving me a press of the Delete key after the paste. I tried pressing ctrl+z (Undo), and Visual Studio restored the removed space; a second ctrl+z press rolled back the Paste operation.

A very minor feature, but also indicative of the great attention to detail that Microsoft has put into the Visual Studio IDE. Pretty nice!