[Michael] The VS IDE has a ton of cool UI features - many that I'd never ever head of before.

If you're a command line kind guy, you can get some use out of the “Find combobox”. I'm sure this feature is in Visual Studio 7.1 + but I also think it's in Visual Studio 7.0.

If you hit CTRL+D from the editor (and I think most other places in the shell) it will take you to the find combo, this combo box right next to the binoculars sitting in an open folder. From there you can type text you want to find, and then hit F3 to search for it.

What's equally as cool is that you can use the “>” operator to put yourself in command mode, and from there you get an autocompleting list of all the commands you can issue to the IDE's shell directly.

For example, I placed the “>” character in that edit box, then typed “F” and it dropped down with a list starting with “File.AddExistingProject”. With autocomplete, I got it to type “File.OpenFile d:\admin.txt”

I was personally impressed that we support autocompletion from the File.OpenFile command.

There are a ton of other commands available, some of which you might find easier to uncover this way.

It's another way to get around the IDE without having to mouse around, especially if you don't remember all the keyboard shortcuts.