Whenever I found a bug that required the developer to investigate on my machine, I swear the first thing each and every one of them would do was dock the Class Stack alongside the Solution Explorer.

If you’re dealing with call stacks only 5 lines deep, you’ll probably like the default layout – docked to the bottom.  However, if you’re dealing with call stacks 20 lines deep, you probably want to be able to see more lines without wasting your editor space.  By tab-docking the Call Stack Window alongside the Solution Explorer, you’ll be able to see many more lines in your Call Stack window without rearranging your editor.

Another good keyboard shortcut many don’t know about. I only say that because I forgot all about this one until now…

There is a command called View.ClassViewGoToSearchCombo which does exactly as it says.

When you press Ctrl+K, Ctrl+V, wherever you are in the IDE, your focus will jump to the Class View search combo box, so you can just start typing and searching immediately.

Visual Studio has a command line argument you can specify to open a file in an existing instance of VS.

Just run devenv /edit <filename> and the file will open in the IDE.

You could also create a VSEdit command if you find yourself using this feature a lot.  Just create a file called "VSEdit.cmd" (you can use notepad to do this) with the following:

@"devenv.exe" /edit %*

provided you already have %Program Files%\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE added to your system PATH environment variable. And, of course, you might want to place this VSEdit.cmd in a directory that's in your PATH or add it.

We’ve all seen smart tags before, the little line that appears whether we’re renaming something or VS wants to help us add a using statement to our code.

There are two keyboard shortcuts to invoke (show) smart tags in the editor. There’s the keyboard shortcut no one can seem to remember Alt+Shift+F10, required for consistency with Office’s smart tags. Then there’s the slightly easier to remember keyboard shortcut Ctrl+. (period)

In C# it’s cool that you can just press Ctrl+. then press Enter, and the smart tag does its job. But in VB, you have to press Ctrl+. then arrow down (to select the first item) then press Enter. Sigh, yet another accessibility bug…

The command is View.ShowSmartTag if you want to rebind to something else. the Blogosphere seems to like Alt+Down Arrow, which isn’t bound to anything in the Editor scope.

Directly from the help documentation:

To display an End User License Agreement (EULA) in the Visual Studio Content Installer, you must embed this information in the .zip file. WinZip supports including embedded information through the Comment feature. For more information about WinZip, see http://www.winzip.com. For more information about the Comment feature, see the WinZip Help file.

Using WinZip 12.0, the Comment feature is found under View – Comment.

As soon as you run a .vsi that has this content embedded in it, you''ll see the EULA dialog box pop up.

Hey, i’m just saying…