Solution Navigator: Get rid of your toolwindows

Adrian Collier has just blogged about the release of the Solution Navigator extension for VS 2010. One of the things I hate about Visual Studio is the number of tool windows that I have to juggle around. I have two big monitors at work and I still run out of screen real estate every so often. I hate working from home because on my laptop screen, after all the toolwindows, there’s like seven pixels left for actual code. So, anything that promises to reduce the need for multiple toolwindows excites me. Solution navigator, in one fell swoop gets rid of a bunch of toolwindows that I use regularly. There is a solution navigator pane that takes the place of solution explorer and makes it much richer. The tooltips (pinnable!) are the killer feature for me though, hover over any artifact in your code and everything you’d want to know about that is present in a tooltip.

This works for both C# and VB projects. I also happened to write the initial support for VB projects before the Solution Navigator team took over ( It was a very fun week writing the basic plumbing and seeing everything light up!). Check it out and give the team your feedback.