Working on a train with a laptop you soon get to learn that using a mouse is very unproductive.  Certainly on the trains in the UK your continually jossled by ropey train tracks or the person crammed in next to you.

I've taken to trying to learn a new shortcut key every day in visual studio and to aid in this I've found a handy switch that in 2005 at least is switched off by default.  On the Tools/Customize screen theres a checkbox called "Show shortcut keys in ScreenTips", switch this on and next time you mouse to a toolbar you'll have the opportunity to learn that function.  Ctrl KK, KN, KP have saved me so much time over using the bookmark buttons. 

I've also remapped a few keys, particularly the Ctrl Up and Ctrl Down to take you to the top of your current or next method when in text editing mode, much better than scrolling the screen a line at a time which is there default operation.

One slight problem I've encountered with developing purely on my laptop for my own projects is source control.  I take regular backups using Microsoft Sync Toy to my NAS box at home which is fine for the disaster recovery scenario.  What I was lacking though was a way to version and recover my code back to a time before I made a stupid decision.

I've not known anything but source safe in my work environments and I've never found it that good, especially for branching and rollback scenarios, but I've stuck with it as I've been concerned about visual studio integration with other products.  But now I've found a solution.

Subversion is a good open source version control system and theres a lot of different ui's about for it as well.. the one that caught my eye was SVN Tortoise, which instead of plugging into a design environment plugs directly into explorer.  Right click on files/folders and you have complete source control, far more powerful than source safe ever offered and because it's at explorer level you can version manage anything from text files up! 

I'm just using it for simple single user roll back/tag scenarios but it's full multi user, merge as well as locking support and supports web based access to it.  Give it a try.

Whilst I'm on a blogging roll I thought I'd mention my favourite icon editor of all time as well, Axialis Icon Workshop.

Version 6 has a truely inspired design mechanism that lets you build icons with glossy shine to em in minutes using just drag and drop.  I'd definately recommend you check it out if you have to knock up icons quickly.

If your looking for a color picker for whatever reason, web design, win forms development, graphic design then check out Visual Color Picker by Novosib Software.  It's a free utility and it has so many different ways of choosing/capturing colors you'll be spoilt for choice.

It also provides you with a simple output screen which you specify your favourite development environments color function and it'll fill it all in for you just ready to copy and paste. Whether it's rgb, cmy, comma separated, hex, you name it'll provide it.

I've just had one of those doh! moments so I thought I'd write about it here in case I ever forget it.

I've avoided using the listbox for years and years (since VB5 I think) since it doesn't fill a specified height.

Forced back to a listbox for a bit of owner draw code I want to implement (which is really cool and easy in .net by the way) I was hit by my age old problem.. then a property just jumped out at me, IntegralHeight which is set to true by default, this is the magic little thing I've been looking for which (if set to false) stops the listbox resizing to a multiple of it's item height.  I'm not sure how long this has been here and I feel an idiot for missing it if it was in VB5 but now I know, and I'll use listboxes for more stuff rather than stick with listviews in detail mode.

Bit of an un-usual one but if you want to return a result set in a random order then you can use this;

SELECT *
FROM table
ORDER BY NEWID()

NEWID creates a unique value every time it's executed, the values are non-consecutive.