Ever tried to hammer the nail by keeping it in the middle of the handle? Not so effective, isn’t it? So know your tools and learn how to use it properly! Nowadays IDEs and other code editors are powerful and gain new features every year.
They help you do things like:
– navigating to a file
– renaming the variable
– looking up value of the variable
almost mindlessly, via hotkeys, shortcuts, and intelligent context menus.
Keep your mind occupied by important and hard things: business or algorithmic problem, current state of program execution, possible solutions, values in variables and let your tools help you with all the other, easy, repetitive, mechanical work.
Take note of things you do often and help yourself. Except of the tasks mentioned before I’d recommend shortcuts for:
– building and cleaning solution
– starting app
– running tests
– inserting breakpoint
– going to the next code to be executed (step in) / next line to be executed (step – without going inside a function)
– executing code up to the position of the cursor
– finding code by member, file, type
– going to the function, type definition
– finding all references
– viewing function signature
– previewing and accepting code autocomplete
– moving type to a new file
– adding new file