Share via

Quickly finding a file in a solution

  • Article

When watching folks look for a file or attempt to find something in a list of items, I find there are really two kinds of folks - "browsers" and "searchers". A "browser" appreciates having a hierarchy and being able to navigate to their particular file. A "searcher" appreciates the type-ahead features of the treeview and listview to find a particular item, or types in a wildcard in filename box to reduce the number of entries.

For the "searchers" out there like me, a large solution in VS can become problematic. The solution - use the command window to open a file.

  • Open the command window (Control+Alt+A)
  • > open Foo.cs

This will autocomplete to all the Foo.cs'es in your solution, so you dont have to find it.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    June 25, 2006
    I've been using this for a while but it does have a pretty annoying limitation. It can't open forms that are separated into designer and code classes using partial classes. It just beeps and says it can't find the file (even though it suggests it in the intellisense).

    Go figure.
  • Anonymous
    June 26, 2006
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    June 28, 2006
    Ok thanks for that little tip, I WAS a browser before hehe.
  • Anonymous
    September 17, 2006
    This is a great tip from a JFO post on blogs.msdn.com , one of the few Microsoft bloggers I continued