Lubo Blagoev's Blog

You are using Visual Studio for development right? Chances are that you have everything under one solution file. This includes the usual Class library projects, Web projects, Database projects (Data Dude rocks!), Console applications, Smart Client applications, Web Services, Unit Testing, Functional Testing, Silverlight applications just about anything from CLR stored procedures and Drivers to UI applications is under one solution file right? Well not exactly but you got the point. If you have this many projects at one solution file you need an easy way to navigate and find files in it. There are couple of ways you can ease your work.

• First did you know that if you start typing a files name in solution explorer it will traverse down the tree and select the file that matches. It is the standard type-ahead support for all Windows list views and tree views controls.
• If you need something more robust you can install SonicFileFinder free add-in. It works great and list all file names containing the search expression.

It also supports wildcards so you can type Ext*Methods for example. For complete list of features see features overview.

• If you prefer open source you can look at Visual Studio Flat Solution Explorer. It doesn't allow to search by part of a file name though.
• What if you are in a file and you want to navigate to it in solution explorer. Well that is natively supported. You just need to enable Track Activity In Solution Explorer feature. It is ON/OFF setting unfortunately so you should work either enabled or disabled and sometimes it is irritating since when you switch to the next tab in VS it will jump to the file in solution explorer which may not be your intend. That's why I think it is disabled by default. In any case you can use it by double clicking on it just for the matter of one-time sync. You can also assign a keyboard shortcut through Options->Environment->Keyboard.

If you want more tips and tricks I suggest you visit Sara Ford's blog (category Visual Studio 2005 Tip of the Week).

I hope this helps. Don't worry, be happy!