The Moth

I discovered a small new feature in the Visual Studio “Orcas” IDE which I am already finding useful.

How many times have you had a Visual Studio solution open and you wanted to quickly open Windows Explorer and navigate to the folder of the solution or maybe the folder of the project or maybe the build folder (e.g. Bin\Debug)?

What I used to do with VS2005 is open a code file, right click on its tab and select “Open Containing Folder” (don’t tell me you didn’t know about that one!) and then navigate up/down to go where I really wanted to be. In particular, many times I would “Show All Files” in Solution Explorer, then expand the bin\Debug folder, open the pdb file in VS just so I could right click on its tab and select “Open Containing Folder” (sounds long winded but is actually much faster than any alternative):


Now with Orcas, life becomes easier. Simply go to Solution Explorer select the solution node or the project node (or even a bin/obj folder if you have shown all files) and then... right click:

Notice just above “Properties” the new menu item “Open Folder in Windows Explorer”? It does exactly what you expect it to (and yes, I know that I am easily pleased :-D)

BTW, if you want to assign a shortcut key to the command (via Tools->Options->Environment->Keyboard), its name is ProjectandSolutionContextMenus.Project.OpenFolderInWindowsExplorer.