Welcome to my Visual Studio Tricks series. Here I’ll give you some quick tips for saving you lots of time when working with Visual Studio.

In this first installment, I’ll show you how to switch between projects more quickly. Any time you work on a large project, you’ll have several projects that you might want to launch from within a solution. This includes at least an EXE and a unit test project right? Hint, hint, nudge, nudge.

Typically you do this by right-clicking on the project and say “Set as Startup Project”. But did you know you can set a hot key for this? Just go to the keyboard options in VS 2005 and type “SetAsStar” and you’ll see this screen:

If you select the startup project option, you can now add a keyboard shortcut. Sounds simple but it saves lots of time and fumbling with the mouse. There are no hotkeys assigned by default. Note that I chose -+P. That seems like a good choice for me.