Find all References in Visual Studio 2017

By Samir Behara on April 15, 2017 • ( 3 )

While working in Visual Studio 2017 earlier today, I noticed a cool productivity feature and thought to write a blog post – short and simple.

All of us might have used the ‘Find All References‘ feature in Visual Studio. What we get in result is a big flat list, which looks something like below screenshot —

In Visual Studio 2017, this feature has been upgraded and it looks lot better now – both visually and from a functionality perspective. As you see in the screenshot below, the output is no more a flattened list.

It is colored, far more organized and displays the results in a tabular format.
You have the option to sort the results based on Code/File/Project.
You can even search for something specific in the result set by using the ‘Search Find All References’ box.

Generally you click on the required references, and it navigates you to the exact place in code which you need. However instead of explicitly clicking all the time, you now have a tool tip displayed with the reference in the source code. This is cool, since you can now save time by not unnecessarily navigating to additional pages.

There is also a ‘Keep Results’ button in the results toolbar, which allows you to keep the current results in the existing window and any new invocation of ‘Find all References’ feature is displayed in a new tab.