Of late, I have been coding in C# using Visual Studio 2005.  One day while merrily going about my way, I must have accidentally hit the Control key and some keys.  A little known “feature” was discovered.  All my spaces turned to “dots”.  Apparently, this is called the visible whitespace feature.  I’ve seen (and used) it in Word, but have never seen it in a code editor.

Unfortunately, my code became highly unreadable in this format.  I tried looking through the dialogs to see if I could find ways to turn it off to no avail.  Finally, I found this article to be of much help:

http://aspadvice.com/blogs/name/archive/2006/09/15/Visible-Whitespace-in-Visual-Studio.aspx

Ctrl-E-S does the trick apparently.  It turns on and off this feature.