VB.NET Solution Explorer

A home for all your project files

An About Visual Basic reader just sent me this comment:

-----------

It may be obvious, but if I store a Word 2007 ".docx" file in the same folder as are stored the Form.vb files for a VB 2008 project, and then click on "Refresh", the .docx file duly appears in the list of accessible objects.

And, mirabile dicu, if I (double)click on it in that selfsame list, it opens ... in Word 2007!!!

By golly, someone did something correctly!

It's certainly one way of maintaining concurrent documentation.

-----------

Very good point! But it goes well beyond that.

A lot of people forget that Microsoft designed Visual Studio to be a complete development environment for all kinds of files. Common text files are one of the file types that you can "Add" right from the Solution Explorer menu.

But you can create any file type in the solution and VB.NET will let you manage it inside Solution Explorer. Not only Word, Excel, and other Microsoft products, but purely proprietary types will open with the program specified by their file extension.

Some file types, like XML and HTM, can be edited with VB.NET support including Intellisense and error correction.