After reading through Minh T Nguyen's Visual Studio .NET Tips and Tricks, I have to say it's just a killer book from start to finish. This book is similar in spirit to Deborah Kurata's Best Kept Secrets in .NET.
Organizationally, it's broken down in 5 Chapters but they all concern themselves with making you more productive using Visual Studio .NET.
The first Chapter, Editing Code covers a lot of areas, many of which I knew, many of which I didn't. There's the pretty standard stuff you expect like how to correctly use XML Comments but there's a lot of other stuff that I knew about but never used becuase I didn't think it was that cool. He's changed my mind though. Rigorously and meticulously using XML comments is a great thing to do and definitely a value added activity. Inserting your own Comment Tokens is another one. Creating Shortcuts and using the clipboard ring are two things that will save you a ton of time - and there's quite a few more in there
Chater 2 - Exploring the IDE is another pretty basic yet cool section. Deborah was the first one to show me the Aliasing your favorite commands, but Minh touches upon it to as just one of the roughly 20 tips in this chapter.
Chapter 3 covers Compiling, Debugging and Deploying. I've already become the Overlord of the debugger because I make so many mistakes, but it's a superb discussion. The money tips are "Linking files instead of Copying them into a project" and "Setting Pre/Post Compile Build Steps"
Chapter 4 covers Visual Studio .NET 2005 which is a subject near and dear to my heart. "Opening web projects through FTP" is undoubtedly one of the cooler ones as is "Adding a Standard Menu Strip". He even touches upon the ever so controversial "Edit and Continue". Most of the features I'm already familiar with, but he shows you how to use the new productivity features in depth.
The last Chapter is "Other .NET Tips and Tricks". Many many gems in there.
I definitely learned a few new cool tricks, my favorite of which is being able to cut Rectangular sections from the IDE. Look at the following:
| private System.Windows.Forms.Button button1; private System.Windows.Forms.Button button2; private System.Windows.Forms.Button button3; private System.Windows.Forms.Button button4; |