I’ve been working in Visual Studio for years – long enough that many of the most useful keyboard shortcuts are now permanently embedded in my finger muscle memory. Sure, there are plenty of shortcuts I need to look up from time to time but I usually think I have a pretty good handle on them. Every once in a while though, I do something silly and Visual Studio either rewards or punishes me in an unexpected way. Today was one of those days.

For whatever reason, I was holding the ctrl key when I hit backspace in VS2013 and suddenly the entire property name just disappeared! I tried it again and the preceding dot disappeared. One more time and the object name disappeared.

I have no idea how it’s taken me this long to stumble upon this shortcut but I’m glad I did! You can see the behavior in the animation below.