Visual Studio Productivity Features

These are collection of tips and resources that will enhance productivity in Visual Studios.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Links to Shortcut key how-tos:

• How to change VS keyboard shortcut keys
• VS keyboard shortcut key command list

Below are a list of frequently used shortcuts with their command name.

Navigation:

• Window.NextDocumentWindowNav: 
• Navigate between files and tool windows
• Ctrl + tab and use arrow keys to select
• Window.CloseToolWindow:
• Closes the currently active tool window
• Shift + Esc
• Window.CloseDocumentWindow
• Closes the active tab
• Ctrl + F4
• Project.OpenFolderinWindowsExplorer
• Opens a folder in Windows Explorer
• Alt + F
• File.OpenContainingFolder
• Opens the currenrt file location of the active tab in Windows Explorer
• Alt + F, F
• Window.ShowDockMenu
• Shows the dock options for the current tab
• Alt + - (alter and underscore)
• Project.ShowAllFiles
• Shows all files, including excluded files for the current project. Press the same combination keys again to hide excluded files.
• Ctrl+P, A
• View.PropertyPages:
• Displays the property pages for the currently selected item.
• Alt + Enter
• Project.Properties: 
• Displays the project properties window for the current project 
• Alt + F7

Text Editing

• Data.Column
• Delete the current line where the cursor is on and move the line below up one line. This is a shortcut that I use very often
• Ctrl + L

Debugging

• Debug.AttachToProcess
• A frequetly used feature, specially, in web development to attache to the IIS server
• Alt + A
• f11: step into
• shift f11:step out
• shift alt f11: step in to a specific property
• step over properties and operators

Code Snippet 

• svm: staic void main
• prop tab tab: auto property
• class tab tab: class
• cw: Console.WriteLine();
• ctrl . :implement method
• ctrl k s: select and wrap a sectio in class...

Visual Studio

• Tools.Options
• To open the options window
• Alt + O

Open External Applications Thorugh Visual Studio

• Click here to find out how to open external programs (for instant, SQL Server Management Studio) from Visual studio

Visual Studio Themes

These are some good links to sources of nice themes for visual studio text editors:

http://studiostyl.es/schemes
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/VisualStudioProgrammerThemesGallery.aspx