Visual Studio - tips for managing work on many open files [closed]

Answer 1

You can use Productivity Power Tools extension for VS.

Once installed go to Tools -> Options -> Productivity Power Tools -> Document Tab Well -> General -> then check "Show tabs vertically".

This will give you a list of open files on your left.

Answer 2

ReSharper and its Recent Files feature works a lot better for me.

Answer 3

I mostly use Ctrl-TAB to cycle through the tabs I have most recently been working on. I can seem to manage a stack of 4 or 5 files without thinking in this way. If the file is out of the stack then I usually settle for reopening it again using Ctrl-O.

Or if the file I want is related to a piece of code I am looking at, so highlighting a variable, method, etc that is defined in that file and hitting F-12 works.

Answer 4

I ran into the same problems described here, so I created a visual studio addin to manage open documents in "sessions", it's free and open source, you can find more information on the codeplex project here

Answer 5

I've created Tabs Studio add-in for Visual Studio exactly for this purpose - to comfortably work with a lot of opened files. Tabs Studio add-in offers multiple rows of tabs and tab grouping.

See Tabs Studio home page for more information.

Answer 6

My company uses Visual Assist X. This provide numerous great features in Visual Studio, first and foremost a better "intellisense" capability. However, it also has an "Open File in Solution" dialog which allows me to type substrings of the file I'm looking for and filters the list accordingly. I highly recommend this software to any developer working with Visual Studio.