I recently got a job working for a company who uses several programming languages but mainly focuses on C#, and thus uses Visual Studio 2008.
As lame as it sounds, I don’t know how to use it productively. I don’t know any of the keyboard shortcuts, I didn’t know you could restrict builds to certain parts of a solution until someone showed me. I’m sure there’s a way to “Clean” “Build” “Run” without manually initiating each process, but I don’t know what it is.
If it was just a “Search the help” problem, that’d be easy to solve, but I don’t even know what I might be missing. Is there a productivity feature that everyone else uses and I don’t? {Shrug}
So, what simple features of Visual Studio am I likely to be missing, and how can I find out other power-features to help me become more productive?
Sara Ford wrote the book on VS tips and tricks:
http://www.amazon.com/Microsoft%C2%AE-Visual-Studio%C2%AE-Tips-PRO-Developer/dp/0735626405/
Here is a blog post with 24 of Sara Ford’s tips
http://blogs.msdn.com/saraford/archive/2009/05/28/devdays-09-24-visual-studio-tips.aspx/
I also recommend James Avery’s book:
http://www.amazon.com/Visual-Studio-Hacks-Tools-Turbocharging/dp/0596008473
I hope this helps.