Let’s take a shortcut

I’ve been working with a lot of new developers lately and have noticed that there’s a lot of useful keyboard shortcuts in Visual Studio that I never bothered to learn. Now I always stick with the default configuration unless it’s absurd or something I really like (for example turning hard corded strings yellow) because customisation doesn’t propagate.

So here’s a list of the new ones (and the invaluable ones you should already know). I’ve been saying “I should really learn that shortcut” but never bothered to actually do, until now.

• Ctrl+.
• Opens the auto-refactor suggestion context menu e.g. “Implement this interface”, really good one.
• Ctrl+e
• Exceptions window. This allows you to automatically break into the code when an exception is thrown and the debugger is attached. Saves a lot of F10
• Ctrl+g
• Go to line. You should know this already.
• Ctrl+k, Ctrl+c
• Comment line or selected code with the correct comment syntax.
• Ctrl-J
• List the members for statement completion while in edit mode.
• Ctrl-Shift-F9
• Remove all breakpoints in the current debugging session
• Ctrl-Shift-F5
• Rebuild and restart debugging.

For a complete list of shortcuts, see here: http://www.dofactory.com/ShortCutKeys/ShortCutKeys.aspx