Brennan recently posted a great tip for changing the RSS Feeds that Visual Studio displays on the Startup page. Finally I can get rid of those horrible Microsoft articles and get some good content in that window!

I quickly realized that many VS users probably already knew about this, but to many others, self included, this was totally new. And what's more, it's useful!

So with that in mind, I decided I would start sharing some simple tips, tricks, and shortcuts that I use within the VS IDE and Windows environment to reduce the friction of many day-to-day development tasks.

Open Containing Folder

Within the Visual Studio IDE, right-click on a file's tab and select the Open Containing Folder context item. This will launch a new Windows Explorer window and navigate directly to the file's directory in the file system.

This is very useful if you're a Subversion + TortoiseSVN user as it will allow you to quicly access all of the TortoiseSVN context menus for the file. It's also great for doing merges, diffs, etc...

On a related note: If you are a TortoiseSVN type of guy (or gal), you might want to check out VisualSVN. This is a great little VS plugin that brings all the goodness of TortoiseSVN right into the IDE. Talk about zero-friction! Do keep in mind that VisualSVN is not free (as in beer nor speech).

Open Command Window Here

Another great context-menu trick that I use is the Open Command Window Here command for Windows Explorer. This menu item will launch a new terminal command prompt and automatically navigate to the directory you right-clicked on.

Clear as mud? Let's walk through a quick example just to be sure.

Say that I'm in the Subtext source code and I'm working with the Installation SQL scripts. Now let's pretend I want to run some commands from the command prompt against some of the files within the Installation Scripts directory (as pictured above).

To quickly launch a command prompt directly into that scripts directory I only need to SHIFT + right-click on the Scripts directory from Windows Explorer, and then select the Open Command Window Here context item. Now I'm ready to start executing commands without having to navigate through the file structure by issuing a bunch of cd commands. This is especially useful if, like me, you tend to keep an Explorer window open to the files you're currently working on.

More to come

As I said in the start, these tips aren't meant to be ground-breaking and process changing in caliber. They are just small things that help me get my work done... and reduce friction along the way. I intend to post more articles like this in the future as I discover little gems that boost my productivity.

If you have more tips, tricks, shortcuts, etc... please share! It's all about the community effort. :)