Visual Studio tip: finding the command associated with a keyboard shortcut

Let's say you are working with Visual Studio and you accidentally press a keyboard shortcut, and then Visual Studio starts to do something, but you're not sure what happened. Let's say that you hit Alt+F11 for instance, and suddenly Visual Studio started to build your application?

To solve mysteries like this, you can go to Visual Studio's keyboard shortcut customization dialog box, and attempt to press the shortcut key there. If the key is assigned to an existing command, the name of the command is shown.

To open the customization dialog box, use the command Tools/Customize, and then click the Keyboard button at the bottom of the dialog box. This will open a new dialog box simply titled "Options". In this dialog, press your shortcut key inside the "Press shortcut keys" input field.

And the mystery? With the above solution, it gets solved: the Alt+F11 shortcut key launches the "Run Code Analysis for Solution" command in the Build menu.

Happy hacking!