Visual Studio is sexy. In the world of Integrated Development Environments (IDEs), it stands as a beautiful example of how environments should work. Yet many of the features created to improve productivity, I believe, are largely neglected. Most developers use only a small percentage of the capabilities in this wonderful product—not because they don’t want to use them, but because developers don’t know they exist.

In most books that address the various .NET languages or technologies, Visual Studio seems to be mentioned almost as an afterthought; to be fair, its focus is primarily on the language or technology that’s the subject of the book, not the IDE—which is as it should be. On the other side of the coin, books written about Visual Studio do focus on the product, but tend to be broad in scope, describing features, but without saying much about their actual use.

The goal of this book is to arm you with techniques that you can apply immediately to improve productivity. Use the content in this book anywhere, anytime, to dramatically reduce the time required to perform just about any task in Visual Studio. You won’t find an exhaustive treatment of every feature in Visual Studio in this book, but it contains sufficient coverage that we’re sure you’ll find something useful, regardless of how you use the product.

This is much more than just a tips and tricks book. Within these pages are—for the first time ever—the keyboard mapping shortcuts, commands, and menu paths for features, along with detailed descriptions of how to use them. We worked very hard to present the information in a way that makes the book easy to read cover-to-cover or as a quick reference.