A quick Visual Studio tip for the day. As a program evolves the number of projects in a Visual Studio Solution increases overtime. And more often than not the solution has more than one startup projects. What amazes me is that Visual Studio with the default keybindings does not have a shortcut for “Set as StartUp Project”.

Knowing  Visual Studio is as extensible at it is, a custom short cut for Set As StartUp project can be achieved in less than 2 minutes. And here’s how.

Step 0: Fire up Visual Studio. Navigate to Tools->Options.  Click Environment->Keyboard.

Step 1: Type StartUp in the Show commands containing: Textbox

Step 2: Select the command Project.SetasStartUpProject from the search results by clicking on it.

Step 3: Click on the TextBox below Press shortcut keys: & You should see the Text Caret blinking. And be extra careful and make sure that you Click and not bring the focus to the textbox using the by Tabbing into the field.

Step 4: Decide on the shorcut you want to assign to this particular functionality and key in the shortcut while the focus is on Press Shorcut keys (see previous step). A Caveat here – make sure you bind this functionality to a shorcut that is *not* previously bound to any command in which you case you loose the previous binding or bind it to a shorcut that you rarely use. In this post I would be binding the command to Shift + Alt +  S  key combination – A shorcut that is associated with the Image Editor that I hardly use.

Step 5: Click on Asign and voila !

Usage

When you’re in the Solution Explorer select(or highlight) a project you would like to Set as StartUp project and hit Shift + Alt +  S  And use the shortcut until your fingers bleed :)