Visual Studio 2010 Professional - Tweaking and some useful tips

Hi there.

Recently I started working using Visual Studio 2010 Professional. Just like any other IDE, I also faced a bit difficulty when I started using it. However, once you get the hang of it, it becomes very useful. One problem is that the starting time of Visual Studio 2010 Professional is very slow. Another thing is, most of the keyboard shortcuts are unknown to us. Yup, we have the brochure, but it is difficult to find the useful ones out from it.

Making Visual Studio 2010 Faster


There are several steps. Almost of them are required to be changed from Tools, Options.

1) Disable Rich Client Visual Experience from Environment. Keep the hardware acceleration checked.

2) From Projects and solutions, uncheck "Track active items in solution explorer", and "Show output window when build starts".

3) From Projects and solutions, Build and Run, Check "Only build startup projects and build on the Run"

4) From Environment, Startup, change settings to Start with empty environment/disable start page

5) Add the path of Visual Studio IDE executable to exception list in your anti virus.

Adding Extensions

That should make your Visual Studio a bit faster. Now, some add-ons to make your programming experience better. Go to tools, Extension manager

1) Install productivity power tools
2) Visual studio color theme editor (If you want to change the theme that is)

I learned most of the tweaks from this link:

http://lennybacon.com/2010/10/18/UltimateGuideToSpeedUpVisualStudio.aspx

Some useful Keyboard Shortcuts

1) Show SmartTag AKA Auto fix options AKA auto correct Options (yup, good old eclipse)

ctrl .

2) To Comment

Ctrl k,c

3) To Uncomment

Ctrl k , u

3) Reformatting the document

Ctrl k d

4) Insert Code Snippets

Ctrl k s

I found this excellent keyboard shortcuts article here

http://www.itscodingtime.com/post/Visual-Studio-2010-Keyboard-Mouse-Shortcuts.aspx