Visual Studio Hacks

Find Files Quickly #17

Chapter 3, Navigating Visual Studio

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HACK

files and folders. The Solution Explorer usually works perfectly; however, it

starts to fall short when you have a lot of projects and files. If your solution

has six projects and 500 files, finding one of those files starts to become

quite a task.

Find Files

A free add-in that provides a new interface for finding files anywhere in your

solution is available. It is called the VS File Finder and can be downloaded

from the following link:

http://www.zero-one-zero.com/vs

The first step is to download the add-in and run the installation file. The

installation does not include any choices and can be completed by simply

launching the .msi file. Once the add-in is installed, it will show up as a new

window the next time you start Visual Studio. If it does not automatically

appear or if you’d like to show the window again after you close it, you need

to click View

➝ VS File Finder, and the window will be displayed. Figure 3-6

shows the VS File Finder interface, which includes a list of all the files in all

the projects in my solution.

The text box at the top of the window lets you enter any number of charac-

ters—the list below will be filtered based on what is entered in the window.

Unlike the IntelliSense provided by the command window, this window will

search for the entered string in any part of the filename. Figure 3-7 shows

the string