Refreshing browsers directly from Visual Studio 2013

Refreshing browsers directly from Visual Studio 2013

The “Browser Link” feature of Visual Studio 2013  allows you to refresh the running web application in all the opened browser.   If you enable this features, Visual Studio creates a channel between the IDE and all the open browser to interact between each other.   By this, sending a “Refresh” command  from the Visual Studio IDE, can refresh the browsers which are currently  running the web application from that instance of IDE. This is a really great features for all the web developers.

You will find the “Browser Link” icon just beside the “Run” option in the toolbar and by default it will be disabled.

Linked Browser Enable

To start it working,  you have the select “Enable Browser Link” option as shown in below.

Linked Browser Enable Checked

Once done, if you run the web application from Visual Studio in a single or multiple browser, you just need to click in the “Browser Link” icon or just press “Ctrl + Alt + Enter” .  You will find, all the browsers are getting refreshed automatically .

To test it properly, you can do some changes in markup and see the changed effect or use developer to track the new request coming in.

Refresh Browsers From Visual Studio

Attache Browser Developer ToolBar

By hovering the mouse on the “Browser Link” icon, you can see what are the browser are now attached with Visual Studio. As shown in the image below, you can see, on that particular time of instance, two browser are connected with Visual Studio.

Attached Browser

This will really help the web developer while working on multiple browser simultaneously and wanted to test the application based on some code or style change.

 

Abhijit Jana

Abhijit runs the Daily .NET Tips. He started this site with a vision to have a single knowledge base of .NET tips and tricks and share post that can quickly help any developers . He is a Former Microsoft ASP.NET MVP, CodeProject MVP, Mentor, Speaker, Author, Technology Evangelist and presently working as a .NET Consultant. He blogs at http://abhijitjana.net , you can follow him @AbhijitJana . He is the author of book Kinect for Windows SDK Programming Guide.

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