Sometimes I want to explore my folders from inside Visual Studio instead of Alt-Tab’ing to Windows Explorer; there are already excellent tools to do that on Visual Studio Gallery. But what they do is ephemeral; as soon as you close your session your folder structure is gone. What is more, they don’t let me annotate the folders that I am interested in or eliminate uninteresting ones from view without deleting them. On the other hand, I sometimes need to have different sets of the folders persisted so that I can concentrate on them later on. Furthermore, I also need to bring home the folder structure of some servers I have been using at work and persist some comments about them.
So, it is not just a question of exploring the file system from VS.
Therefore, I wrote a small DSL that lets me choose the folders that I am interested in, annotate them and persist the set that I want to peruse later. It is posted on the Visual Studio Gallery.
Actually, the real impetus for me was to migrate my old VS2008 C++ projects to VS10 so that I can uninstall VS2008; but I don’t remember their locations! So, I have to categorize the folders as C++ or other solutions, at the very least, and then as VS2008 and VS10. Even before categorizing, it is a good idea to give a description to all relevant folders; what were they for, will I be needing them, do they depend on anything else…
SixPairs 