.NET Tips and Tricks Open Spaces

The late session Thursday, I tried out Open Spaces for the first time - Sara Ford, who does the Visual Studio tip of the day ran a session on Visual Studio tips and tricks. She has a vast collection of tips, obscure keycodes and showed some of the coolest/most popular ones. They're all on her blog, but here are some of the ones I was unaware of and will incorporate into my daily routine:

Enabling Guidelines - registry edit that allows you to drag guidlines into the vs text editor

Under Tools.. Options.. Text Editor.. All languages.. General uncheck "Apply copy and cut if no blank lines" checkbox
This DOESN'T overwrite what's on your clipboard if you accidentally cut or copy twice by accident before you paste, and your cursor happens to not have anything selected. I do this all the time and I thought it was just me.

Ctrl+w = select current word

Right click find window to make it dockable.

Right click on file tab.. open containing folder opens win explorer to current file's folder.
Right click on file tab.. close all but this closes all other windows.
Right click on file tab.. full path gets the full file system path to that file.

ctrl-tab allows you to tab to all open files and windows windows w arrow key.

ctrl-alt-downarrow pops arrow on tab window to show additional unshown files.

Options.. startup, can specify new start page

ctrl-f2 goes to navigation dropdown + tab goes to 2nd drop down showing methods.

Any file menu + ctrl tab goes to first item in the standard toolbar

Customize toolbar window looks modal but is not.

LEFT Shift alt tabs to the first button in a toolwindow's toolbar (like schemas, solution windows)

alt-minus (with floating window active) and you can move it around with the up-down keys. I'm not sure how much I'll use it, but it gave me a chuckle.

Anyway, these are all available on her blog, but it was nice to have a session and get the cream of the crop. She also has a tip of the day gadget for Vista.

This was the only Open Spaces session I got to, but it's a cool addition to the conference sessions.