Visual Studio Add-Ins: Explorer

My next find for a Visual Studio Add-In is called Explorer, and is another free one available from http://www.codeproject.com/csharp/Explorer.asp . Explorer is easy to install and use.

After you download, extract the two files to your My Documents/Visual Studio 2005/Addins directory (create the Addins directory if it doesn’t exist). Then launch Visual Studio, click on Tools, Add-in Manager, and make sure Explorer is loaded.

Using Explorer is quite simple, just right click on the Solution, Project, or a folder and you’ll see a new menu option, Explorer.

 Explorer has a submenu with two options, “Open folder” and “Execute this application”. Open folder opens up a windows explorer folder in the same directory where the item you clicked on resides. This is a very handy way to quickly navigate to the directory where your project resides.

Note the “Execute the application” option only appears when you are on a project, not the solution. However, this is handy when you have a test project that is not your main application. Using this menu option keeps you from having to go through the effort of changing your startup project to run a rest program that is part of your solution.

Be aware this does not build the project, it runs the last built exe you created. If you’ve made changes to the project you want to run be sure to do a build before using this menu option.

If you are interested in writing your own add-ins, you should also check out the available source code. It’s a nice example of how to hook into the menu structures for writing your own add-ins.