I used to find the smart tag really annoying in Visual Studio because it is such a small target to hit with the mouse. Silly me, trying to expand a smart tag with a mouse.

VS-smart-tag 

When you highlight the tag with your mouse, it tells you that the keyboard combination of ALT + SHIFT + F10 will expand the menu.

What it doesn’t tell you is that there’s a two key combination that will also expand it. I learned this one from Karen Liu of the C# IDE team who also happens to have a blog post with a nice collection of other tips and tricks written last year.

Just hit the CTRL key plus the period key (CTRL + .)

VS-smart-tag-expansion

I really like this approach when performing renames within Visual Studio because it’s totally contextual. Rather than starting with a rename refactoring, I can instead just start renaming something and the smart tag shows up and all I have to do is hit CTRL + . and then ENTER. Booyah!