Need a new line above what your currently typing? Imagine this walk through. [HOME],[ENTER],[UP]. Three keys to get a new line. There is a shortcut reducing this to two keys. This quick trick shows you two keyboard shortcuts to enter line lines, one for above, and one for below your current focused line.

[CTRL]+[ENTER] = Insert Line Above

• (Same effect as [HOME],[ENTER],[UP])

[CTRL]+[SHIFT]+[ENTER] = Insert Line Below

• (Same effect as [END],[ENTER])

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Visual studio wants you to be happy 🙂 If you like breaks before braces, and after; if you like self closing <br /> tags, if you don’t want self closing <br /> tags. Whatever your fancy, you can automatically have Visual Studio apply with a very quick keyboard combination. This is extremely helpful when you are looking at source code created by someone else. Maybe on your current team, or just an old project.

[CTRL]+[K],[D] = Format Document

[CTRL]+[K],[F] = Format Selection

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Commenting code is great. We all do it, all day long. Commonly I’ll see the following done to comment multiple lines of C# code.

[HOME],[/],[/],[UP],[HOME],<Repeat />

This just takes too long. It’s too many keystrokes. This Quick 2 minute video shows you all about commenting, and uncommenting, and even has an added little trick to know about ASP.NET (ASPX) Commenting.

[CTRL]+[K],[C] = Comment the current line, or selected lines of code

[CTRL]+[K],[U] = Uncomment the current line, or selected lines of code

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Have you ever opened someone else’s source code (maybe an open source, code sample, or even other team mate) and the code just isn’t aligned? This can happen because of spaces and tabs. By default, Visual Studio shows a tab as four spaces. So without white space visible (Tricks #003) four spaces, looks the same as a tab. If a previous developer (who maybe wasn’t even using Visual Studio) had tabs setup differently.

This quick 50 second video, shows you how to instantly convert spaces to tabs, or tabs to spaces. Either way you like it, Visual Studio is there to make you happy.

[CTRL]+[R],[W] = Show / Hide White Space

Edit | Advanced | Tabify Selected Lines = Convert Spaces to Tabs

Edit | Advanced | Untabify Selected Lines = Convert Tabs to Spaces

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Visual Studio has a ton of Keyboard shortcuts built in. In fact, there are HUGE PDF Prints available for VS2005 C# and Visual Basic, as well as VS2008 C# and VS2008 Visual Basic. If you want to change or add to the current keyboard shortcuts, this video shows you how.

Visual Studio 2010 Keyboard Shortcuts for Download (Microsoft)

Massive List of 2012 Predefined Keyboard Shortcuts for VS2012 (Microsoft)

One of the first custom keyboard shortcuts I add is [CTRL]+[ALT]+[P]. This shortcut isn’t used for anything, so I’m not overriding anything built in, but I bind it to “Debug.AttachToProcess” which is much faster than navigating to Debug | Attach to Process.

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