So you've created a great winforms app with loads of controls, you fire it up, start tabbing through fields, and the cursor is jumping all over the place. What a pain. Now you have to go back through each and every control and set the tab order manually in the Properties window. Sound familiar?

In a stroke of pure genius, Microsoft thought of this too. Visual Studio contains built-in support for graphically setting control tab order – no more properties window.

To begin, load up your form in the designer view. The go to View >> Tab Order.

Your form should now have little blue boxes with white numbers over each control. Now you can simply start clicking through the blue boxes to set the tab order. As you set each item, the blue boxes will turn white and display the new tab order. When you have clicked through all the controls, the boxes turn blue again. If you screwed up, you can click through again.

Click through to View >> Tab Order again to exit this feature.