What are your most-recommended Visual Studio preferences?

Question

There are so many little options and settings within Microsoft Visual Studio. Which adjustments do you recommend to others?

Answer 1

Set the active document you're working on to display in the solution explorer. I've seen a lot of people hunting for their current doc if the project gets too big.

Tools -> Options. Make sure show all settings is checked.

Click on Projects and Solutions.
Enable the Track Active Item in Explorer checkbox.

alt text http://img370.imageshack.us/img370/4821/trackactivedocumentqv2.gif

Answer 2

Prevent Visual Studio from renaming pasted controls

How do I prevent Visual Studio from renaming my controls?

Answer 3

Besides, Line Numbers, the first thing I always do in a newly-installed IDE is set the Edit.GoToDefinition keyboard shortcut.

Tools > Options > Keyboard

Answer 4

Tools -> Options -> Environment -> Keyboard

Setup a shortcut to close the active document. Ctrl+Alt+W in my case.

Answer 5

I'm somewhat surprised to be the first person recommending Visual Studio Hacks for a lot of suggestions of this variety

Answer 6

Check out this thread for the Color theme options for Visual Studio https://stackoverflow.com/questions/141371/which-visual-studio-color-theme

And consolas is my favourite font