Everyone knows that Visual Studio can be such a great IDE, but sometimes you feel that something is missing.
It’s okay if you have to search for each file in Visual Solution when you have four…maybe five files, but things can go really bad when you have sixty…seventy files in your solution. It’s a lot of waste of time having to search file by file every time you need something. Then we all think: doesn’t Visual Studio have a quick open file? Something that make possible for me to search files by the name, like quick open from TextMate? No, unfortunately Visual Studio doesn’t come with that option, but happly we have a solution. I’ve trying to find that for six months or more, until I got that plugin: Quick Open for Visual Studio 2008.
That’s a complement developed for Visual Studio which makes possible the quick open file function. You press the keys and the window is going to open. You type the file’s name (or part of it) you want, find it, and then press “enter” to open it.
The installation is pretty simple, just download the component here @stJhimy’s github.

Extract the RAR and open the installation. Let the images guide you:

Next…

Next…

Next…

Wait…

Close.

That couldn’t be simpler. Now, if you open your Visual Studio 2008 and go to Tolls>>Customize>>Keyboard and try to find Edit.QuickOpenFile you should see that screen:

Just change the shortcut to whatever you want, personally I prefer CTRL + ALT + O, but that’s your choice.

After changing the shortcut, open some project and test it. You should see the quick open file screen like that one above when you press the shortcut:

It’s a simple tip but is something really cool and helpful.

Here’s a short video showing how it works:

As usual you can download the article (including Portuguese version and Visual Studio Quick Open File Installation) on @stJhimy’s github.

Thanks again to Talita Facirolli for text corrections.

Feel free to make comments and criticisms

Hope you enjoy the micro tutorial.

Cya.