Addons

I've added a few extensions to Visual Studio that I thought I'd point out. By way of disclosure, I'm using Studio 2010 Professional, so these may or may not work with anything else.

First:
Power Productivity Tools from Microsoft

This is the coolest and most useful plug in I've found. You can follow the link above to see what it does in detail, but it includes things like auto brace completion, a couple improvements to quick find and a really nice improved scroll bar that allows you to see all break points and bookmarks on the scroll bar. Best of all, you can turn each feature on and off individually.So if all you want is to be able to cntr-click to go to the definition (very handy, by the way) you can shut the rest down.

Next:
Power Commands
This one is a bit less useful for me, but still has some nice things. The ability to "open containing folder" so you can get to the Windows Explorer location of the file is, itself, enough of a reason to get this. "Open Command Prompt" also ranks up there, since it will not only open the prompt, but auto-navigate you to your project folder.

Finally:
Indent Guides
This is a must have! It basically draws little colored lines connecting every open brace to its corresponding close brace. So it makes it much easier to debug a nested if inside of a loop inside of a method inside a class inside a name space and actually *understand* it.


Other things:
Keyboard shortcuts
Microsoft has made some of the keyboard shortcuts available as a poster.
Some of my favorite lesser-known ones:

• F12 on anything will take you directly to its defintion
• ctrl and the minus sign ( - ) is like a "back" button in a browser and will return to your last location. So if you put a cursor on a method reference, then hit F12, you'll be at the method definition. If you then type ctrl-, you'll be "back" to the place where you originally put your cursor.
• ctrl+shift+-  () will move you forward -- like a "forward" button in a browser. 
• Ctrl+shift+b does a build of the current project. 

Hope this all helps you be more productive. I think I deserve a cookie now.
--kevin