Three Tricks in Xamarin Studio

I wanted to share three tricks that I use a lot in Xamarin Studio/MonoDevelop.

Trick 1: Navigate APIs

Xamarin Studio's code completion for members of an object defaults to showing all the members sorted by name.

But if you press Control-space, it toggles the rendering and organizes the results. For example, for this object of type UIWindow, it first lists the methods available for UIWindow sorted by name, and then the cluster for its base class UIView:

This is what happens if you scroll to the end of the UIWindow members:

Trick 2: Universal Search

Use the Command-. shortcut to activate the universal search, once you do this and start typing it will find matches for both members and types in your solution, as well as IDE commands and the option to perform a full text search:

Trick 3: Dynamic Abbreviation Completion

This is a feature that we took from Emacs's Dynamic Abbrevs.

If you type Control-/ when you type some text, the editor will try to complete the text you are typing based on strings found in your project that start with the same prefix.

Hit control-/ repeatedly to cycle over possible completions.