Lisa Feigenbaum from the VB Team at Microsoft just published a list of her top ten Visual Studio keyboard shortcuts. I'm very fond of keyboard shortcuts, both in Visual Studio and in Windows. I couldn't imagine having to use the mouse to copy (Ctrl+C), paste (Ctrl+V), cut (Ctrl+X), switch applications (Alt+Tab), open the task manager (Ctrl+Shift+Esc), minimize all open windows (Win+M) or lock my computer (Win+L).
And when you spend a good amount of your day in the IDE as I do, the developer in you kicks in and you have to find a more efficient way of doing things.
So here are my top ten favorites (VB.NET in Visual Studio 2005), in no particular order:
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Shift+Tab to switch the active document.
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Ctrl+K, Ctrl+C and Ctrl+K, Ctrl+U to comment and uncomment the current line or currently selected lines.
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Shift+Del to delete the line of code currently in focus by the cursor.
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The classic F5 to start debugging.
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Ctrl+Z and Ctrl+Y to undo and redo recent changes.
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Ctrl+Shift+Left Arrow and Ctrl+Shift+Right Arrow to select text word by word, instead of character by character.
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Ctrl+K, Ctrl+D to format the current document or selection. In VB this auto-formats the casing, indentation, and layout (if enabled).
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F10 and F11 to step over and step into, respectively, when debugging.
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Ctrl+F and Ctrl+Shift+F to Displays the Find and Replace dialog box for a single-file and multiple-file search, respectively.
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I don't have a number ten, offhand. Although from looking through the list, I'll have some new ones shortly.
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