If you are like me, you live inside of Visual Studio. I have at least one instance of VS open virtually round the clock, and, as I've discussed here before, use VS to manage not only my ASP.NET applications, but also as the editor of choice for managing sprocs, UDFs, and views in my databases. (Granted, SQL Server 2005's Enterprise Manager makes working with these database objects a much friendlier experience than SQL Server 2000's EM, but using VS makes it a cinch to have these objects' script stored in source control...)
With Visual Studio .NET, developers could extend the system through little known tips and tricks or macros, making their time with the tool more productive. Books like Visual Studio Hacks are a great place to learn secrets for better working with this IDE. (More info on this book here.)
Visual Studio 2005 offers a super cool productivity enhancement, IntelliSense Code Snippets. Code snippets in Visual Studio 2005 takes IntelliSense to the next level, allowing developers to define their own mini-IntelliSense expansions. If you use Visual Basic you're no doubt familiar with the expansions VB provides for you - enter in Public Property name As Type and hit Enter, and VB fills in the Get and Set accessors automatically. It's always so annoying going back to the C# world and having to type in the complete property syntax by hand after you've done some coding in Visual Basic for a spell. Fortunately, these annoyances end with VS 2005 and Code Snippets. With Code Snippets you can define such expansions for C# (although many of VB's common expansions already exist and are part of the default Visual Studio 2005 installation), as well as invent new ones that can be used easily in either the VB or C# worlds.
My latest 4Guys article, Creating and Using Code Snippets in Visual Studio 2005, shows how easy it is to create and use Code Snippets. Not only can you create your own Code Snippets, but Code Snippets can be imported easily and even downloaded and installed from the web with one click. Sites like GotCodeSnippets.com make this process as easy as point and click. Just search the GotCodeSnippets.com website for snippets that would be of use to you, then click the Download Now! button to install the snippet on your computer.