Jeffrey McManus

I don’t use Dreamweaver to build web sites anymore since they gave up on supporting ASP.NET, but a few years back it was my favorite tool — for all its wrinkles, in the 1999-2003 timeframe, Dreamweaver was better than Visual Studio for building web sites. I’m looking forward to seeing what Adobe does with the Dreamweaver product in its next release, whenever that might be.

One extremely useful keyboard shortcut that stuck in my brain from my years of using Dreamweaver is Ctrl+` (that’s control backtick, the button on the left side of the keyboard where the tilde is located). It lets you quickly toggle between visual display of your page and code view. I’m not sure if there’s an equivalent default keyboard shortcut in Visual Studio, but the command certainly exists and you can assign it to Ctrl+` pretty easily if you still have Dreamweaver brain cells attached to this behavior.

To do this, in Visual Studio 2005, open a web page and open the Tools, Customize menu. Click on the Keyboard button at the bottom of the dialog, then scroll down to select the View.ToggleDesigner command. Then click in the text box labeled "Press shortcut keys" and type Ctrl+`. Bingo, you now have the same keyboard shortcut to toggle between code view and the visual page designer.

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