- Posted by justin on September 24, 2007
Great link that Scott Gunthrie posted to an article on vs2005 productivity tips. http://www.chinhdo.com/chinh/blog/20070920/top-11-visual-studio-2005-ide-tips-and-tricks-to-make-you-a-more-productive-developer/
For tip #3, I would also add in a ctrl+[ shortcut that builds the current project for the file that is open. For large solutions that have several projects that are not required to be built in order for you to test out new functionality this is a great time saver. Yes you could use the alt+b, alt+u combination but this gets really old really quick when doing dev work all day long. In order to set this you need to select the command Build.BuildSelection in the command list under the keyboard options in vs. By default ctrl+[ is used for something like previous color but I never use that shortcut before so I didn't mind overriding it.
Tip #6 is a great productivity tip. I use it all the time instead of F5 since normally when I want to debug I have already built the projects and am encountering errors that I need to trace through. No sense in rebuilding the projects and going thru another JIT compile if the source code has not changed at all.
The collapse all project in solution explorer macro in tip #12 is something that I could really use. I can't count the times that I have done this manually and it is a pain to do in larger projects.