Part 1: Navigate with the back/forward buttons on your mouse
Part 2: Fix annoying jumping toolbars
Part 3: Using the find window to quickly open a file
A couple quick ones:
- Click with your middle mouse button (or scroll wheel) on a tab to close a document window.
- Window > Close All Documents (not where I thought it should be)
- Re-map Control-W to Close Document (like IE/Firefox)
- Tools | Options | Keyboard
- In ‘Show commands containing’ type SelectCurrentWord
- Click Remove
- In ‘Show commands containing’ type File.Close
- In ‘Press shortcut keys’ type Control-W
- Click ‘Assign’ and ‘OK’
- Use Control-Backspace and Control-Delete to delete entire words. Control-Delete is especially helpful when the cursor is at the end of the line and you want to delete the line break and the leading tabs/spaces of the next line.
- Use Control-. to bring up the smart tag for adding using statements.
- Use Control-I to quickly search through a document. After you’ve located a match, hit Control-I again to cycle through other matches.
- Right-drag code to invoke context menu for with options for moving or copying (if you can’t be bothered to hold control while dragging).
Check out one of my coworker’s new .NET/C# code-related blog at code.nontalk.com. He’s already got three helpful posts up (I especially like the most recent post on converting relative paths to absolute using regex).
Part 1: Navigate with the back/forward buttons on your mouse
Part 2: Fix annoying jumping toolbars
This tip comes courtesy of Rob Prouse who posted this recently in a comment on this very site. Here’s a quick way to open up a file without taking your hands off the keyboard:
"In the toolbar, type >of in the find window, then start typing the filename you are looking for. An autocomplete list of all files in your project will come up that you can select from. Select, hit enter and up pops the file in the editor!"
Great tip! Thanks Rob!
UPDATE: Here’s another post outlining even more tricks with the Find box.
Continuing my series of ‘Stupid Visual Studio Tricks’ (see Part 1), today’s tip fixes one of the more annoying things about Visual Studio: bouncing/flashing/crazy context-sensitive toolbars. This is particularly annoying when working with SQL Server Management Studio over RDP because it frequently causes a full-window redraw which can be soooo sloooowww. The jumping toolbars also drove me crazy when I used the Copy Web Site feature, but I don’t use that anymore.
To work around this annoyance, I create an empty toolbar as such:
- Right click in an empty section of the toolbar area, select ‘Customize…’
- Select the ‘Toolbars’ tab and click ‘New…’
- Give the toolbar a name (I use "Blank"; clever, huh?) and hit ‘OK’
- Drag the newly created toolbar (which can be tough to spot but it should be just to the right of the Customize dialog) up to the far right of the toolbar area.
The next time you open a window you might see three toolbar rows instead of two with the middle one just being the blank toolbar you created. Just drag the bottom row up to the middle row and it will be there next time you open a file. Now go ahead and switch between a .aspx and code-behind file. No more jumping toolbars!
Right click on a method, select Go To Definition, click fancy back button on mouse. Neat huh? Forward works too. If you don’t have a mouse with back and forward buttons, you’re missing out.
How big a geek do you have to be to feel bummed about letting a domain name registration lapse because you haven’t had a need for it in years? Well, that’s how big a geek I am. In 1998 I registered wiseguysonline.com to be used for my software, web development and computer repair company. It was the first domain I ever registered and I believe it cost $35/year from Network Solutions. It served me well for years but that’s now two businesses ago and I haven’t used the domain for anything since 2001 or 2002. The domain expires tomorrow and for the first time, I’m not going to renew it. So long friend, enjoy being parked by some shady squatter.
