Visual Studio Keyboard Shortcuts

I'm a big fan of keyboard shortcuts. When I first started working with AutoCAD, I learned to rely less on toolbars and buttons and more on entering short aliases in the command line to get things done. The result was that I spent less time going back and forth from the keyboard to the mouse. Later, when I started using Photoshop, I was amazed at how much time you could save using keyboard shortcuts like CTRL+T (free-transform layer) and CTRL+J (new layer via copy).

The most important keyboard shortcut I ever learned, however, was CTRL+S. It only took one time losing hours of work in a CAD drawing to start using it religiously.

Now I look for shortcuts for any program I spend a lot of time working in. And since I've been spending more time with Visual Studio than with my friends and family the last 5-1/2 weeks, I've gotten pretty friendly with these little time-savers. Here are some of my favorite...

Shortcut	Operation	Notes
CTRL+K, C	Comment a line of code	You can place cursor in line without selecting anything
CTRL+K, U	Uncomment a line of code	Same as above
CTRL+SHIFT+ENTER	Blank line after cursor line	Cursor can be anywhere in the line, and you don't have to use END, ENTER
ALT+UP or DOWN	Move line up or down	Cursor can be anywhere in the line, without selecting
CTRL+DELETE	Delete word to right
CTRL+BACKSPACE	Delete word to left
CTRL+. (period)	Open Smart Tag	When you get the red squiggle, sometimes it's hard to get to this with the mouse
CTRL+ALT+L	Open Solution Explorer
CTRL+; (semicolon)	Focus on Search Solution Eplorer	Same as above, except puts your cursor in the search box
CRTL+, (comma)	Focus on Navigate To	This searches for words in entire solution and takes you to it when you hit ENTER
CTRL+F	Open Quick Find
CTRL+H	Open Quick Replace
CTRL+Q	Open Quick Launch	Allows you to search everything in VS, including tools & options
CTRL+ALT+S	Open Server Explorer
CTRL+W, E	Open Error List
F1	Navigate to Help File	Place cursor in any keyword in text editor, opens MSDN help file for item
F12	Navigate to Definition	Place cursor in code to find definition
CTRL+SHIFT+B	Build Solution
F5	Start Debugging
CTRL+F5	Start w/o Debugging
CTRL+F6	Next Tab
CTRL+SHIFT+F6	Previous Tab

Oh, I almost forgot CTRL+K, D... Automatically formats tabs and white-space to make your code look snazzy!

End of Week 5 Update

Things are coming along pretty well here at camp. We wrapped up the admin dashboard for Fund.io this week, complete with database driven tables for campaigns and comments, graphs for sitewide stats and key performance indicators.

We incorporated some pretty cool features like ajax page updating (which allows the database to be updated and shown on the page instantaneously without reloading the page), and a modal for displaying details about an item without leaving the current page. I also redesigned the front-end slider with a new parallax background effect. When the site goes live, I'll be sure to post links.

I've got a good head start on Goalizr as well. Officially, we were supposed to get started next week on our personal projects, but I heeded the advice of some of the previous campers and started working on it a while back.

For practice, and to learn the latest features in Visual Studio, I migrated my initial solution from VS2012 to VS2013 so it's now running on .NET 4.5.1, MVC 5, Entity Framework 6, and Bootstrap 3. I have a working CRUD for goals, activities &  emotional states, ability to add new users, and a login system that allows logging in with an external API, like Google. Currently, the app is using a basic Bootstrap theme, but I have some mockups in Photoshop I'll be trying to implement for the front-end of the site using HTML5 and CSS3.

Inspired by some of my fellow campers blogs, I'm going to try to post more specific code examples and how-to's pertaining to the technologies I'm using to build my project. It may or may not be helpful to others, but at least I'll have a record of the whole process for me to go back to.

In addition to my personal project, I've been brainstorming with a few of my classmates about getting their own projects up and running. One is an online Jeopardy game for learning C# terms and definitions. Another is a site that allows independent comic book/graphic novel creators to promote and sell their work online. And the other is a site that connects writers and artists and helps them work together to develop children's books, comics, graphic novels, book covers and more. Pretty excited about helping out on these projects too...