Getting to know your IDE

Mastering your enviroment is a critical key to being a productive and happy developer. Besides your language and operating system of choice you need to get deeply personal with your other tools. If you come from Visual Studio Code (VSC) some of these will be familar tools and others will be a great new surprise.

using Visual Studio IDE 2022 Community Edition, (windows 10+) with default bindings

CTRL + F

Text search, works on selected text, file, project or solution scope. This also opens up the dropdown menu for text replacing and regex matching.

CTRL + -

Navigates to the backwards in the scroll position history, great for going backwards if you jumped around the page

CTRL + Shift (+) +

Navigates to the forward in scroll position history, great for restoring where you were before you went back.

F12

While over any object method, F12 brings you to the interface definition

CTRL + F12

While over any object method, brings you to the class definition

ALT + F12

While over any object method, shows a dropdown of the class definition

CTRL (+) +

Over a red squiggle line, opens the refactor dropdown menu

Shift + F10 (or) MenuKey

Shift + ALT + W

Wraps selected text in a html div tag - In a razor, html, or cshtml file with the web development bundle installed in VS IDE

CTRL + ALT + Home

Keeps current file in tab (if current file is just a tmp or preview file)

CTRL + G

Jump to Line Number

Back to Basics

Also don’t forget the power of the keyboard as is… its a terminal user’s (ie text based navigational GUI) best friend.

• Home: navigates to the very top of the page
• End: navigates to the very bottom of the page
• Page Up/Down: Moves your scroll view up/down an entire view height
• Delete: Like backspace but the other way!

The shortcuts you’ve (hopefully) learned about today are my top most used and immediatly helpful no matter where you come from both experiance and tool wise.