Windows 7 added support for customizing the taskbar at the bottom of your screen.  You can “pin” and re-arrange your application icons on it however you want.

Most developers using Visual Studio 2010 on Windows 7 probably already know that they can “pin” the Visual Studio icon to the Windows 7 taskbar – making it always present.  What you might not yet have discovered, though, is that Visual Studio 2010 also exposes a Taskbar “jump list” that you can use to quickly find and load your most recently used projects as well.

To activate this, simply right-click on the VS 2010 icon in the task bar and you’ll see a list of your most recent projects.  Clicking one will load it within Visual Studio 2010: