The reason for me asking this question is:-
I get a real buzz out of discovering features in Visual Studio 2008 that end up saving me oodles of time every day. Recently found a blog by Sara Ford who grinds out a tip each day on her blog.
Am wondering what is the biggest time saving tip you can give in terms of using the IDE in visual studio 2008?
Up to now the best feature I have discovered is Ctrl + and Ctrl - for navigating back and forth.
Using the Refactor shortcuts. Click on Refactor in the Menu and you'll see the short list. For instance, Ctrl+R,M for "Extract Method."
My biggest time-saving feature is IntelliSense, although that's not realy a hidden feature. ;)
Just the refactoring on context-menu alone...
edit: ++conditional breaks if that wasn't obvious
When you are posting shortcuts, think about its different depending on what keyboard mapping scheme you are using. I for an example are using "Visual Basic 6".
So please add what scheme you are using as information with the shortcut.
SHIFT+F2 to jump to the definition of a variable/function/whatever the cursor are pointing to and CTRL+SHIFT+F2 to jump back from where I was is my time saver.
In c# you can use CTRL+å (norwegian keyboard, the key to the right of P on us/uk keyboards) to jump between bracket pairs. If your cursor is on the { bracket, you jump to the matching end backet and vice versa.
If you have a large solution, turn off the Auto Populate Toolbox entry in the settings. This will save you lots and lots of time if you are working with the graphical designers such as for WinForms.