Why does Visual Studio 2008 automatically insert the following using directives into each new C# file I create?
using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Text;
What’s so special about these namespaces? Are these the most frequently used ones?
Yes, they’re frequently used, that’s all, so MS put them in the Visual Studio templates. Personally I use ‘sort and remove unused usings’ pretty frequently, so they often go away.
If you want to remove them, you can amend the ‘new class’ template.
EDIT: If you become a fan of ‘Sort and Remove Unused Using Directives’ you should get hold of PowerCommands for Visual Studio – that adds a Solution Explorer context menu item to do it for a whole project instead of just one file 🙂