I’ve been speaking at user groups and conferences for a long time now. Usually at these short talks I don’t get asked much about how I use Visual Studio.  But now that I am teaching Silverlight, my students are never shy about asking what I am doing while in Visual Studio.  I am often amazed by how people use Visual Studio without learning some of my favorite hotkeys/snippets.  Here are some of mine:

Keyboard ShortCuts

• Ctrl-Shift-B: Build Solution
• Ctrl-. (period): Show “Add Using/Imports” dropdown for unknown types.
• Ctrl-K, C: Comment Selection
• Ctrl-K, U: Uncomment Selection
• Ctrl-K, F: Format Section
• Ctrl-K, D: Format Document
• Ctrl-Space: Show Intellisense List
• Ctrl-Shift-V: Paste Loop - Hit Multiple Times to paste through the list of recent ‘copies’
• Ctrl-F: Simple Find
• Ctrl-Shift-F: Find in Files
• Ctrl-H: Simple Replace
• Ctrl-Shift-H: Replace in Files
• Ctrl-N: New->Project Item
• Ctrl-Shift-N; New Project
• F9: Set Breakpoint
• Ctrl-Shift-R: Start/End Temporary Macro Recording
• Ctrl-Shift-P: Play Temporary Macro Recording
• F12; Navigate to Type (or metadata for Type) under the cursor

Snippets

(To use these snippets, type the phrase and hit Tab twice)

• prop: Create a simple property in a class
• **propg: **Create a simple property with a public get and a private set
• foreach: Create a foreach block
• sldpc: Create a Silverlight Dependency Property*

* This snippet is from the Silverlight Contrib snippet collection.

What are yours?