No one person could ever hope to master every shortcut an expansive IDE such as Visual Studio has to offer. The best thing you can do is get a handle on the most useful ones, though “most useful” doesn’t mean “well-known”, as Microsoft’s Scott Hanselman highlights.
In a post entitled “Visual Studio’s most useful (and underused) tips“, Hanselman cracks out some surprisingly handy factoids about getting the most from Microsoft’s pervasive development suite.
For example, the Solution Explorer features a rather in-depth and intelligent node-based search ability:
You can just click the text box above the Solution Explorer to search all the the nodes — visible or hidden. Or, press “Ctrl + ;” … [You can even find] stuff that’s DEEP in the beast. The resulting view is filtered and will remain that way until you clear the search.
If you want to jump-search to a method or class, that’s even easier. The combination of the Control key plus the comma key (Ctrl+,) will bring up the “Navigate to…” search box:
Why click around with your mouse to open a file or find a specific member or function? Press Ctrl+, and start typing. It searches files, members, type…everything. And you can navigate around with your keyboard before you hit enter.
There’s basically no reason to poke around in the Solution Explorer if you already know the name of the item you want to see. Ctrl+, is very fast.
These a just a couple of the more interesting tips Hanselman explores — hit up his post below for more.
Visual Studio’s most useful (and underused) tips [Scott Hanselman]
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