Main workspace area

The main workspace area is where you will actually write your code or apply different settings to your application. This section will open different kinds of files that you have in your project. This is the area which, as a developer, you will spend most of your time coding. You can open multiple files in this window. Different files will be shown in different tabs and you can switch from one tab to another just by clicking on the tab. If you need to, you can also pin tabs. You can make the tabs float if you think you need them that way, or you can also make it full-screen size so that you can focus on the code you are working on.

So, when you double-click on files in the Solution Explorer or choose Open from the context menu of the file, that file is opened in a tab in the main editor area. This way, you can open multiple files in separate tabs in the editor window and switch between them when needed. Each tab header contains a few fixed sets of items:

In the preceding screenshot, you can see that the tab header contains the name of the file (Program.cs) that links to the tab; it shows a * when the item needs to be saved, and it has a Toggle pinner button (just like all other IDE tool windows), which makes the tab sticky on the left side, and a close button.  The title section also sometimes indicates some additional status, for example, when the file is locked, it shows a lock icon, and when the object is loaded from metadata, it shows that in square brackets, as in the preceding screenshot. In this section, as we keep on opening files, it goes in a stack of tab pages, one after another, until it reaches the end. After the whole area is occupied, it finally creates a menu on the rightmost corner of the workspace title to hold a list of all of the files that cannot be shown on the screen. From this menu, you can choose which file you need to open. Ctrl + Tab can also be used to toggle between the tabs that are already loaded in the workspace.

Below the title of the tab and before the main workable area are two drop-down menus. One has been loaded with the class that is opened in the IDE, and the right one loads all of the members that are created on the file. These drop-downs menu aid in easier navigation in the file by listing all of the classes that are loaded in the current file on the left, while on the right there is another that contextually lists all of the members that are there in the class. These two drop-downs menu are smart enough to update the drop-down values automatically whenever any new code is added to the editor.

The main workspace area is bounded by two scrollbars, which handle the overflow of the document. However, after the vertical scrollbar, there is a special button to split the window, as shown in the following screenshot:

The horizontal scrollbar, on the other hand, holds another drop-down menu that shows the current zoom percentage of the Editor. VS now allows you to scale your editor to your preferred zoom level. The shortcut for the Zoom feature is Ctrl + scroll mouse wheel.