I just found a nice keyboard shortcut for Visual Studio 2008 by misstake. If you press Ctrl + Alt + Down Arrow you will be moved to the Active Files drop down list, which enables you to quickly select a specific file to make active.

I sure know that this is one keyboard shortcut I will be using a lot from now on!

Far from everyone that uses Visual Studio 2008 (and I believe this was available for VS2005 as well, anyone?) know of the image library that is shipped along with it. If you go to the folder located at %ProgramDir%\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\VS2008ImageLibrary\1033 you will find a file called VS2008ImageLibrary.zip.

Extracting this gives you access to a lot of the common elements, actions, animations, symbols, annotations, buttons and objects which is found in ordinary windows applications and most of them are available in many different file formats and bit depths. It’s a great resource to developers, but be sure to read the ReadMe.html files which exist in each folder because they do contain information on the restrictions Microsoft applies to their use!

If you adhere to the Windows User Experience Interaction Guidelines then these will help you a lot. Come to think of it, if you are developing WinForm applications and haven’t read the guidelines yes, please do yourself (and your users) a huge favor by clicking the link :-)