Unlock the secrets of Visual Studio—learning hundreds of tips and shortcuts for optimizing the editor, search, navigation, windows layouts, and other capabilities. As a member of the Visual Studio Core Team, the author analyzed nearly every feature in the core environment—unearthing the tips and tweaks that streamline work and maximize efficiency. Get practical insights into how IDE features work, and how to quickly adapt them for any programming language.
Accelerate your productivity with Sara’s Top Six Tips—and hundreds more:
Avoid accidentally copying blank lines
Select only vertical columns of code
Cycle through the clipboard to paste multiple elements
Use incremental search to find what you are typing
Increase your overall environment font size
Use tracepoints to log the contents of a variable
Chapter 1 Get Back to Basics with Your Editor
Basic Editing
Scrolling and Navigation
Editor Fonts and Colors
Printing
Status Bar
Chapter 2 Make Your Editor Work for You
Advanced Editing
Opening Files
Bookmarks
IntelliSense
Code Snippets
Chapter 3 Find What You Are Searching For
Searches from the Keyboard
Quick Searches
Find In Files Searches
Other Search Options
Chapter 4 Manage Your Environment Layout
Document Windows
Tool Windows
Window Layouts
Toolbars and Context Menus
Chapter 5 Discover More Tools for Your Design Time, Part 1
Tool Windows
Chapter 6 Discover More Tools for Your Design Time, Part 2
Dialog Boxes
Find Combo Box
Start Page
Chapter 7 Know Your Solutions, and Other Project and Debugging Tweaks
Project and Solution System
Debugging
Appendix A Visual Studio Factoids
Visual Studio Q&A
Appendix B Tips on Blogging Tips
Secret "Tip of the Day" Formula
Appendix C Software Testing Tips
Five Tips for Surviving as a Tester
Appendix D How I Started Programming
Hunt the Wumpus
Say "YoHo"
Typing on the TI-99 4A
Playing Nintendo
Will Solve Math Problems to Code
Studying in College
Enter Microsoft
Interviewing at Microsoft
Tip 252: You Can Make the Statement Completion Window Transparent
Appendix About the Author
Appendix Additional Resources for Developers from Microsoft Press
Sara Ford is the Senior Product and Community Manager at Black Duck Software for Ohloh.net, the largest public destination for finding and evaluating open source software. Prior to Black Duck, she worked for nine years at Microsoft Corp., where she was responsible for CodePlex.com, the open source project hosting forge for Microsoft. She started her career as a software tester on Visual Studio, a software development tool, where she drove the effort to make it possible for developers who are blind or have low-vision be able to write software applications. She is the author of Visual Studio Tips, published by Microsoft Press, where she donated her author royalties to start a scholarship fund (http://www.mgccc.edu/news/book_raises_scholarship_money_for_MGCCC_students.php) designed for residents of her hometown Waveland, Miss. to attend the Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College.
