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jfo's coding

adventures in windows forms and wpf
Quickly finding a file in a solution

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.

Posted: Sunday, June 25, 2006 10:16 PM by jfoscoding

Comments

Josh Einstein said:

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.
# June 26, 2006 12:09 AM

Jason Haley said:

# June 26, 2006 10:19 AM

Benjamin Day said:

I wrote a free plugin for searching and navigating to files in a solution a while back.  Feel free to give it a test drive.  

http://blog.benday.com/archive/2006/03/19/3875.aspx

-Ben
# June 26, 2006 2:49 PM

Salman said:

Ok thanks for that little tip, I WAS a browser before hehe.
# June 28, 2006 12:16 PM

Dave Burke said:

This is a great tip from a JFO post on blogs.msdn.com , one of the few Microsoft bloggers I continued
# September 18, 2006 12:38 AM
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