R – How to one use the “Add view” dialog in Visual Studio efficiently when working with ASP.NET MVC

asp.net-mvcusabilityuser interfacevisual-studio-2008

Does anyone else think that the add view dialog in VS is useless or is it just me?

Why is there no search/filtering in there? I can not even paste the type name (without namespace) there to speed up the view creation.

Plus, there are a lot of irrelevant classes there, including classes from all referenced libraries.

Am I missing something or Microsoft never did any usability testing with that??

Is it possible to filter out types/assemblies in the dialog and/or better navigation compared to manually scrolling the combobox with all the types listed? Is it possible to include only types from a particular directory/assembly/namespace? (the ViewModels namespace for example)

EDIT: As it seems from the answers that there is no usable workaround for this, I have filed a suggestion at Connect: https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=507784

Please vote for the suggestion if you find this is an important issue.

Best Answer

There is search/filter, but it's a "starts with" search. Start typing and the list will be filtered.
You can paste the type name, but you do need the namespace.
No, I don't think you can remove assemblies.

Could it be improved? Sure. Some of your suggestions are good, and you should consider filing Connect reports for them. Is it useless, IMHO, no.

I tried the dialog in VS2010. As of beta 2, it behaves the same as VS2008, AFAICS. So get your suggestions in soon!

Related Solutions

Visual-studio – How to force Visual Studio to regenerate the .designer files for aspx/ascx files

If you open the .aspx file and switch between design view and html view and back it will prompt VS to check the controls and add any that are missing to the designer file.

In VS2013-15 there is a Convert to Web Application command under the Project menu. Prior to VS2013 this option was available in the right-click context menu for as(c/p)x files. When this is done you should see that you now have a *.Designer.cs file available and your controls within the Design HTML will be available for your control.

PS: This should not be done in debug mode, as not everything is "recompiled" when debugging.

Some people have also reported success by (making a backup copy of your .designer.cs file and then) deleting the .designer.cs file. Re-create an empty file with the same name.

There are many comments to this answer that add tips on how best to re-create the designer.cs file.

C# – How to return the current action in an ASP.NET MVC view

In the RC you can also extract route data like the action method name like this

ViewContext.Controller.ValueProvider["action"].RawValue
ViewContext.Controller.ValueProvider["controller"].RawValue
ViewContext.Controller.ValueProvider["id"].RawValue

Update for MVC 3

ViewContext.Controller.ValueProvider.GetValue("action").RawValue
ViewContext.Controller.ValueProvider.GetValue("controller").RawValue
ViewContext.Controller.ValueProvider.GetValue("id").RawValue

Update for MVC 4

ViewContext.Controller.RouteData.Values["action"]
ViewContext.Controller.RouteData.Values["controller"]
ViewContext.Controller.RouteData.Values["id"]

Update for MVC 4.5

ViewContext.RouteData.Values["action"]
ViewContext.RouteData.Values["controller"]
ViewContext.RouteData.Values["id"]