Stephen Walther had a great, practical post recently on his blog with a set of tips and tricks to help developers make better use of Visual Studio 2008.  I have to admit I didn’t know many of these tips and wonder what else I might be missing.  I will pay better attention to shortcuts as I run across them.

Here is a summary of the tips, but check out Stephen’s post to see them in action:

1. You don’t need to select a line to copy or delete it, use CTRL-c
2. You can add a namespace automatically by pressing CTRL-.
3. Never create properties by hand
4. You can remove and sort unnecessary using statements
5. Use CTRL-k+c to comment out code
6. You can close all documents except the current one
7. You can open a database by double-clicking the database file in App_Data
8. You can copy a file or folder into a project by dragging and dropping
9. Use CTRL-SPACE to perform statement completion
10. Add new items by pressing CTRL-N or CTRL-SHIFT+A
11. You don’t need to type file extensions when adding a file

Reading the comments in this post is worth the time as well with some other useful tips:

1. CTRL-x to delete the current line.
2. CTRL-r+e to encapsulate a class variable into a property.

Another source of shortcuts is the Visual C# 2008 Poster from Microsoft, a PDF cheat sheet for magical key bindings.  I also use ReSharper (R#) which has many keyboard shortcuts and it maps to some of the key bindings used by Visual Studio to supplement the features, which is nice.