Visual Studio Tips & Tricks to Streamline Development

Here are a few of my favorite Visual Studio tips & tricks that I use to streamline my development;

Record and play temporary macro

Press Ctrl+Shift+R to record a new temporary macro, then press Ctrl+Shift+R to stop recording.
Ctrl+Shift+P will play the recorded macro.

Previous cursor positions

Ctrl+- (i.e. Ctrl and Hyphen)  cycles you through the code positions that you have visited.
Use Ctrl+Shift+- to navigate in the opposite direction.

Matching brace/comment/region/quote

Ctrl+] takes you to the matching brace. It also takes you to the matching comment, region or quote depending on where your cursor is.

Intellisense suggestions

Press Ctrl+Shift+Space to bring up the intellisense suggestions.

Line numbering

To enable/disable Line number go to Tools|Options|Text Editor|All Languages|General|Line numbers.

If you want to set this option for only one language, then choose the appropriate language instead of All Languages.

Code Snippets

There are Code Snippets for most methods that get used often. To try this, type “for”, and then hit you tab key twice. You can also do this with your “If” and “try” Statements. You can also add your own Code Snippets if there are chunks of code that you often use and don’t want to type in full each time.

Go to http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms165392.aspx  to learn more about this.