Software development is more a part of Research & Development, but this is a totally different story.
Coding is on the other hand a craftsmanship, as Robert C. Martin explains quite good in his book Clean Code. A part of it is knowing his tools. Included is your IDE, our Visual Studio, this is particularly what I want to focus on. Visual Studio alone is already quite a good IDE, but with some productivity extensions its mighty. I.e. ReSharper, which I personally use, or just browse the Extension Manager, built in in Visual Studio.
A quite interesting source is the newly started Microsoft Visual Studio Toolbox podcast provided on Channel 9 by Robert Green.
But it is crucial to know his tools, not just to have them. So we started in our to commit us to personal Sprint goals which could be:
- Learn the Visual Studio and ReSharper shortcuts.
- Code an hour a day without your mouse.
Quite an interesting way of spreading the knowledge throughout the team is to do some coding dojos.