Visual Studio Shortcuts

Date Published: 18 March 2008

Visual Studio Shortcuts

I was doing a bunch of Silverlight last night on a new machine and once again set up my shortcut to basically arrow left in order to let me type in attributes without taking my fingers off of the keyboard and go hunting for arrow keys. I described this shortcut (and the reason for it) here, and I have to say it increases my speed in typing XAML tremendously. Whenever you find yourself within quotes and you really want to jump to the next attribute (which happens, oh, every 5 seconds when typing in large amounts of XAML by hand), you can just hit Shift-Space or Ctrl-Space or whatever you configure and it will move the cursor past the closing " of the attribute you're in. It's beautiful.

The other feature I've been using lately is the Resolve Usings feature in Visual Studio 2008. I just had a need for it and while I know I can right-click and use it from the dialog, I'd much rather use the keyboard shortcut. Wouldn't it be great if the dialog showed what the keyboard shortcut was? Well, it doesn't. So you have to go searching for it on blogs like this one. Or better yet, like David Hayden's. He has an excellent post on how to configure (or use existing) keyboard shortcuts in Visual Studio 2008 with regard to organizing using statements (with pictures and everything). The one I was looking for: Ctrl + . (as in ctrl-period). Again, it lets you avoid having to take your hands off of the keyboard, and for moderately fast typists like myself, that saves a ton of time.

Steve Smith

About Ardalis

Software Architect

Steve is an experienced software architect and trainer, focusing on code quality and Domain-Driven Design with .NET.