Quick Tip - Remove Unused Using References in Visual Studio
Mark Arteaga
Posted on August 1, 2021
When working on a C# project be it Xamarin, ASP.NET Core etc within Visual Studio, developers sometimes forget to clean up using statements
. Now Visual Studio does a good job of showing you visually unused using statements as follows
When you are working on bigger projects (in my current case, working on a project with 774 files), sometimes as a developer we forget to clean up our using statements as we go through code refactoring.
Well, thanks to Visual Studio, we can quickly clean up using statements
in a file in two ways.
First is putting your cursor on one of the grayed out lines and clicking the light bulb, then clicking "Remove Unnecessary Usings". (NOTE: The shortcut key for this is CTRL-.
)
When the action is executed the references will be cleaned up. But what happens when you have 700+ files?
Well if you noticed in the dialog, there is a section at the bottom that says
Here you can see the options are
- Document
- Project
- Solution
Now it's pretty obvious, what the options are, but in all my years of using Visual Studio, I have not noticed these options and no one wants to go through 700+ files to clean them up!
This is what the dialog looks like when you click Solution
So I don't know if this is a Visual Studio 2019 feature or if it's always been there. But this makes it a little more 'enjoyable' to go in and clean up lines of code that are no longer required in your source code!
Posted on August 1, 2021
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