At the day job I spend the majority of my time in Visual Studio, writing, refactoring, debugging, and banging my face against code. C# code specifically.

And what is my #1 complaint about C#? The Compilation Tax.

I get over taxed!

I have a little problem that causes me to pay that tax more often that I think I ought to. I have some kind of weird internal clock that causes my fingers to issue the Ctrl + S, Ctrl + Shift + B keystrokes every five minutes, causing the IDE to freeze up while it compiles my project.

And that really sucks as most of the time I didn’t want to compile, usually because I knew the code wasn’t complete and the compiler was going to yell at me.

But what am I going to do? They are my fingers and I love them, despite how much they like to torture me by making me wait for the compiler to finish doing its thang.

Make it stop... please?

Then today it hit me. Why not just kill the build?

I checked to see if Sara had any tips for the best way to get that done, but didn’t find any. No worries, I checked the keyboard bindings and found that Ctrl + Break does just what I need, cancels the currently running build!

Sure, this might be a really basic and obvious keyboard shortcut to anyone that already knows about it, but its a big, time-saving, deal to me. :)