Scott Hanselman

Another VS.NET Add-in enters the Fray...."Solvent" for Solution Explorer

June 26, 2004 Comment on this post [6] Posted in Programming
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Very cool, Travis has created a Solution Explorer-specific Visual Studio.NET Add-In to make the Solution Explorer "suck less."

Let's hope the innovation keeps coming.

I'm digging Command Prompt Here from within Solution Explorer as well as the ability to Recursively Open all Folders (Though, I've gotten pretty good doing it myself with two fingers and cursor keys, over and over again. :) )

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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June 26, 2004 12:30
What is this "Recursively Open all Folders" action you speak of? Have you tried the asterisk (*) key when the focus is on the root folder? This has worked in treeview's since at least Windows 3.1, although it doesn't recursively collapse.
June 26, 2004 12:36
Meow! :) I like the toggle action myself. Sure * opens them, but I usually need them closed faster than I need them open. Also, + and - open and close the current one, but not recursively.
June 28, 2004 0:54
The plugin looks great - thanks for sharing.
One of the easier ways of doing the command prompt (and "Explore here", to open Windows Explorer at a given location) is simply add an external tool that uses this command:

C:\WINDOWS\system32\cmd.exe - Command Prompt here
C:\WINDOWS\explorer.exe - Explore here

and for Cmd, this initial directory:
($(ItemDir))
for Explore, just this argument:
/e,$(ItemDir)

VS macros such as $(ItemDir) give real power to customising VS in a simple way like this :-). Of course the downside of these examples is that you have to have a target file open for them to work :-(.
Great site BTW.
June 28, 2004 18:47
That works really well if you're not as lazy as I am - custom tools show up in the tools menu. I wanted to get that functionality from the context menu so I stuck it in the Add-In. Actually, that's a great complementary solution; put it both places and all bases are covered. Great tip!
June 28, 2004 19:39
For the folks like me who always want a VS.NET command prompt (and really just have no occasion to NOT have one), I posted a registry hack that makes it so cmd.exe always runs vsvars32.bat at startup. It doesn't use the /k command line option, either, so it'll work with the Command Prompt Here power toy as well as my Solvent plugin.

http://www.paraesthesia.com/blog/comments.php?id=604_0_1_0_C
October 22, 2004 10:37
About the recursive +/-
Have you tried selecting the treenode and pressing * on the keyboard;)

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Disclaimer: The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in any way.