Tips

7 Valuable Visual Studio Hidden Features

Thursday, April 30th, 2009
at 11:36am

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Visual Studio is a very powerful IDE and I have yet to find another IDE that comes close to all the features it offers. Yet they are some hidden gems that can make our every day tasks a little bit easier.

  1. Under “HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\Text Editor” Create a String called “Guides” with the value “RGB(255,0,0), 80″ to have a red line at column 80 in the text editor.
  2. Pressing ALT during selection, selects a square of text instead of whole lines.
  3. Ctrl++ [Control, Plus] or Ctrl+- [Control, Minus] to navigate to previous position of the cursor and back
  4. Ctrl+Shift+V to cycle through the Clipboard history. Visual Studio keeps a history of data in the clipboard
  5. Ctrl+U and Ctrl+Shift+U to uppercase or lower case selected text.
  6. Ctrl+L Deletes the current line.
  7. Shift+F9 to bring the variable in QuickWatch

Hope this Helps.

Hatim

11 Optimization Tips For Visual Studio

Monday, April 27th, 2009
at 6:33pm

Sometimes ago I compiled this list for myself and our team to help get things done faster and deal with visual studio quirks.

Remember if you mess things up you can always reset your Visual Studio Settings (Tools->Import and Export Settings->Reset All Settings)

Visual Studio Optimization Tips:

  1. Disable F1. (Tools->Options->Environment->Keyboard) (I always end up hitting it by mistake when reaching for the escape key)
  2. Disable "Animate environment tools" (Tools->Options->Environment->General)
  3. Disable Start Page (Tools->Options->Environment->Startup)
  4. Disable "Track Active Item in Solution Explorer" (Projects and Solutions).
  5. Disable Navigation Bar (Tools->Options->Text Editor->C#)
  6. Set "AutoToolboxPopulate" to false (Tools->Options->Windows Forms Designer).
  7. Turn off Track Changes. (Tools->Options->Text Editor->Track changes)
  8. Bind Ctrl+Shift+k to Edit.LineDelete
  9. Bind Shift+Enter to Edit.LineOpenBelow
  10. Bind CTRL+SHIFT+ALT+Z to Attach To Process
  11. (Ctrl+K, Ctrl+D) to reformat the code when things get messy

If you have some tips on your own please share in the comments!

Hope this helps!

Hatim