One of my favorite things in Visual Studio has always been CodeLens. It's this beautiful little feature that tells you what's referencing a piece of code and where it is as well as if it has any associated tests.
From what I remember it was only available for the paid tiers of Visual Studio for the longest time. A lot of developers complained that CodeLens was missing from Express, which was an even more limited edition of Visual Studio before Community became a thing.
I hadn't thought about CodeLens outside of a work environment because I just never needed it on the smaller side-projects I made at home. As I've been making larger and larger projects for myself and the community I started to miss having the ability to quickly find where some of my functions or models were being referenced or if they had test coverage.
I mentioned that to someone tonight and they told me that we've had CodeLens in the Community since 2017.
2017!
After looking around the settings, sure enough, I found that it came with CodeLens installed but turned off by default.
All you have to do to activate it is:
<ul>
<li>Click Tools &gt; Options</li>
<li>Toggle open Text Editor</li>
<li>Toggle open All Languages</li>
<li>Click CodeLens</li>
<li>Click Enable CodeLens</li>
<li>Then click OK</li>
</ul>
Ta-da! 🎉
Now you have CodeLens and can start getting better insights into your project like this:
<img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/programazing/image/upload/v1580517112/blogposts/2020/Codelens%20in%20Visual%20Studio%20Community%20Edition/references.png" alt="Number of references a model named Settings Model has" />
<img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/programazing/image/upload/v1580517112/blogposts/2020/Codelens%20in%20Visual%20Studio%20Community%20Edition/test.png" alt="Number of tests a method named Set Settings has" />

One of my favorite things in Visual Studio has always been CodeLens. It's this beautiful little feature that tells you what's referencing a piece of code and where it is as well as if it has any associated tests.

From what I remember it was only available for the paid tiers of Visual Studio for the longest time. A lot of developers complained that CodeLens was missing from Express, which was an even more limited edition of Visual Studio before Community became a thing.

I hadn't thought about CodeLens outside of a work environment because I just never needed it on the smaller side-projects I made at home. As I've been making larger and larger projects for myself and the community I started to miss having the ability to quickly find where some of my functions or models were being referenced or if they had test coverage.

I mentioned that to someone tonight and they told me that we've had CodeLens in the Community since 2017.

__2017!__

After looking around the settings, sure enough, I found that it came with CodeLens installed but turned off by default.

All you have to do to activate it is:

* Click Tools > Options
* Toggle open Text Editor
* Toggle open All Languages
* Click CodeLens
* Click Enable CodeLens
* Then click OK

Ta-da! 🎉

Now you have CodeLens and can start getting better insights into your project like this:

![Number of references a model named Settings Model has](https://res.cloudinary.com/programazing/image/upload/v1580517112/blogposts/2020/Codelens%20in%20Visual%20Studio%20Community%20Edition/references.png)

![Number of tests a method named Set Settings has](https://res.cloudinary.com/programazing/image/upload/v1580517112/blogposts/2020/Codelens%20in%20Visual%20Studio%20Community%20Edition/test.png)

Codelens in Visual Studio Community Edition

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