Professional Visual Studio® 2008

3.3. Other Options

Many options that we haven't yet touched on can be used to tweak the way Visual Studio operates. Through the remainder of this chapter you will see some of the more useful options that can help you be more productive.

3.3.1. Keyboard Shortcuts

Visual Studio 2008 ships with many ways to perform the same action. Menus, Toolbars, and various tool windows provide direct access to many commands, but despite the huge number available, many more are not accessible through the graphical interface. Instead, these commands are accessed (along with most of those in the menus and Toolbars) via keyboard shortcuts.

These shortcuts range from the familiar Ctrl+Shift+S to save all changes, to the obscure Ctrl+Alt+E to display the Exceptions dialog window. As you might have guessed, you can set your own keyboard shortcuts and even change the existing ones. Even better, you can filter the shortcuts to operate only in certain contexts, meaning you can use the same shortcut differently depending on what you're doing.

Figure 3-14 shows the Keyboard node in the Environment section of the Options dialog with the default keyboard mapping scheme selected. If you want to change to use a different keyboard mapping scheme, simply select it from the drop-down and hit the Reset button.

The keyboard mapping schemes are stored as .VSK files at C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE. This is the keyboard mapping file format used in versions of Visual Studio prior to Visual ...