VS.NET Tips & Tricks notes
This is a BoF session where attendees and presenters (from Canada, yay) share neat little things (some known, some obscure) about working in VS.NET.
- Creating a class that implements an interface, pressing Tab after the interface name will create stubs for the methods of the interface
- Ctrl+] jumps to the next end block.
- Ctrl+Shift+] selects the block.
- Ctrl+Shift+I enters incremental search.
- Ctrl+Space (sometimes Ctrl+J, depending on the language) enters IntelliSense.
- In command window you can create aliases (alias command) to access all menu entries
- In command window, immed enters immediate mode.
- Change Dockable from the context menu of the Output window to put it into the source panes.
- Select New Horizontal/Vertical Tab to split the source window to view two or more files at once.
- Ctrl+Tab navigates through open source windows (Ctrl+Shift+Tab navigates backwards)
- Clicking Mark All in the Find dialog will create a bookmark for each entry found.
- Alt+Drag selects arbitrary blocks of text.
- Entering a TODO comment (// TODO: do something) will insert the comment in the task list. You can customize the list of tags that will go in the task list from the Options dialog.
- Alt+Shift+Enter toggles the full screen code window.
- Toggling Search Hidden Text in the Find dialog will search into the collapsed regions.
- In C#, from the Class View, right click on a class and select Add > Property to get a wizard to automatically build a property structure.
- When removing a file from a solution, remember to take it out also from the source code manager (Visual SourceSafe or CVS) to avoid having it compiled and built nightly.
- Don't use MDI :)
- Lots of built-in aliases for the Command Window.
- In Solution Explorer, right click the solution, select Properties and toggle Multiple Startup Projects to start both the client and the server (if you have them) applications.
- Shift-F7 or Ctrl+PgUp/Ctrl+PgDn toggles between views on your file (Design, Source, HTML, Data, etc...)
Email contact addresses for the presenters are:
Very cool session.