Yesterday evening I was sitting on my laptop and thought about what I like in Visual Studio and what I’m missing. Well, at all I’m very happy with Visual Studio, cannot remember any other development environment that is working as good as Visual Studio on Windows.
Here are some features I’m missing or maybe didn’t find yet:
- Close documents automatically when not in use: I would like to have an automatic closing feature that will close files that are not used any more. I mean if you open documents just to see an implementation or some source code this document could be closed after 1 hour or a customizable duration. Some of you know the Windows desktop folder where not used links are placed running a wizard. Of course, documents that are checked out or changed should stay open.
- Find a file in solution explorer: I know that it is possible to enter a filename in solution explorer to find a specific file to edit. More often I’m using similar starting filenames like qualitycheck.aspx, qualitycheckdialog.ascx, qualitychecktab.ascx, qualitycheckedit.ascx,.. And ASP.NET itself creates duplicate starting filenames for the code-behind source files, too. That means I have the .aspx and .ascx again ending with .aspx.cs and .ascx.cs. It would be great to hit a special key, enter a filename in the textbox and have a list of files that fit the search. Using a simple drop-down (live search) it would be much easier to open files in big projects. The textbox itself could find class names or other interesting text, too.
- [...] I will add some more missing features later...
What do you think? Or is there already a solution to do this?