Visual studio shortcuts

Visual Studio as any other IDE has many keyboard shortcuts and other useful tricks. And, naturally, users can adjust them. However there are developers who are not using most of them at all and even more of developers use only small subset of them. Partly because those hidden shortcuts are not that useful in general and can be quite specific and partly because of their hidden nature.

Let me list some of those I found:
First of all - navigation ones.
CTRL + arrow left or arrow right: Cursor position would be moved one word (not character!) left or right;
CTRL + arrow up or arrow down: The whole screen would be moved by cursor position would be still the same.
CTRL + [ or ]: move to the corresponding opening or closing bracket. Especially useful if you have a long cycle or if statement.
CTRL + Tab: navigation through opened tabs. If you have 2 opened files - you can switch them.

Next - some formatting tricks:
CTRL + SHIFT + U: make the selection upper case. One of the applications I have used: database store list of string values. And those can be upper case or lower case, and you need to compare them against a list of predefined constants. If you were given that list of constants in lower case you can transform them quite easily!
CTRL + L: removes the whole line

Selection:
If you hold SHIFT during cursor movement - you can select that area. More interesting options - you can hold SHIFT with other combinations. Like CTRL + SHIFT + Arrow Left would select the whole previous word; CTRL + SHIFT + END would select the whole text from the current cursor position to the very end of the file;
If you hold ALT you can select rectangle in the text. And it doesn't needs to be in the beginning of the line! Try it - hold ALT + left mouse button + move the button! Even more interesting - you can replace the selection with typing or pasting and it will replace each of selected lines!

Build:
ALT + B, U: builds current project only. It is like a separate keystrokes: Alt to activate menu, B to access Build menu and U to build current project. It can be shortened but that shortcut will always work.

Hope this helped!

Developing: for money or for fun?

I was always interested in development - from the very childhood when I was able to build simplest programs using Basic and Commodore 64 through school years and Pascal into current time and C#. For me the development process is fun.
But it is not the only thing I care about development. Much more important side of development for me is my salary. Simply because without that I would not be able to eat :) Though, it messes a little with a fun factor. I have to solve problems that might not be that interesting and I have to spend time on those tasks. Moreover I have to spend my energy and quite often my brains just don`t want to do anymore thinking after work.
Well, mainly because of the last statement I am asking myself - what is more important for me? If it is money than I can easily find another job with a better payments and/or better working hours. And if it is programming itself then why not to start my own personal business?
I am sure that every developer had asked himself similar questions... What were the answers? As I stated in the beginning - I think that money is not that important for me. Therefore I should start something :) So I've decided to make a simple idea planer. I imagine it would be WPF application with an intuitive GUI and a very simple functionality. Why not? It can be fun and can evolve into something bigger!