Those of you who embarked on the Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 train, surely miss my Quick Open File plugin :) Well, good news for you: here it is.
It was not as straightforward to port it over to VS 2010 as I first thought it would be. The new VS IDE is now WPF based, but my plugin is Forms-based. The experience could be best described as a half-day trial and error, struggling to implement undocumented interfaces. Well, I guess that’s part of the beta experience…
Anyway, here it is and I hope you’ll like it. You can get the plugin at Visual Studio Gallery or at my site. Or better yet, open Visual Studio, go to Extension Manager, click at Online Gallery and type “Quick Open File” to the search box. This way you can install it directly from the IDE.
Blog of Martin Kutny 
Heya Martin, just a heads up: looks like VS 2010 RC broke the plugin.
Hey. I’ve heard that this ‘quick open’ feature is now built-in in the RC. Also I don’t use VS 2010 currently so I didn’t bother with an update to my plugin. Can you confirm this for me?
There’s a “Navigate to” function with CTRL+, but it opens methods, types, properties and files. I really liked yours because it was faster and easier to use. Would love an update for the RC.
I couldn’t find any kind of quick open feature in VS 2010 RC.
Allright, I’m dowloading the RC now. I’ll look into it in a couple of days. Btw, one other guy complained about the plugin’s performance. I wonder if you find it slow too. I find it quite responsive on solutions that comprise of around 1000 total files (running on a 3 Ghz dual core), but never tried it on anything bigger.
I kind of noticed it takes a little while (2-3 seconds) the first time I use it after starting VS, but subsequent times are perfectly fine. I’ve used it in an 11 project ~1000 file solution.
Hi there. I got the plugin running under the 2010 RC. You can download it here http://kutny.net/vsopen or from the VS Gallery. Hope you’ll like it :)
Works great! Thanks!
Also works on RTM version. Thanks!
Works great. Just a couple of suggestions.
– Get focus on the input TextBox and select all previous text when opening a new quickfind window
– Allow for multiple strings separated by spaces: ie input “Xml Parser” and match “XmlFileParser.cpp”.
This is how the equivalent Visual Assist X feature works. Anyway even without those 2 features the addon is extremely useful.
Hi there,
The plugin is great, but for huge solutions, search after each keypress can be painfully slow.
You could add a config option to disable the auto-search, so the plugin makes only 1 search when the enter key is pressed, or add a search button so it is possible to tab out of the search edit and pressing enter with the focus on the button will trigger the search.
Thanks.
Hey, I will look into this. I was thinking about moving the search into a background thread and adding a little delay, so it would not start a new search after each letter you type.
Hi there. All text in the text box is selected when you invoke the plugin using the shortcut key. But I will also select it when you simply move focus to the search window. Regarding the second feature, you can already achieve this by searching for “Xml*Parser”. But it’s a good idea anyway, so I will make a space behave like a * wildcard in the next release.
Hi there,
Thanks for taking a look at this. As I said, this is a really useful plugin.
Assuming you plan to release it as a free plugin, would you be keen to post the source code in some repository? Maybe we can contribute to its development. Just asking of course…
Thanks.
Quick vote of appreciation Martin, I really like this plugin and thanks for sharing your work. As others have mentioned a short delay between keypresses and search update would be brilliant as it is noticeably slow on big solutions. The input focus fix would also be brilliant.
Do you have an idea when the next version might be with us? As John mentioned, putting it up on google code or something might really help distribution and development.
Hi Simon, thank you for your appreciation and interest. What you mention is already in progress. Thanks to Ian Obermiller, we have now a bitbucket project for this little tool. There, in the download section, you can find the new version (1.3) release candidate. There is a lot of new features in it. I will make a public announcement when it is ready (I still need to resolve some minor issues, update the wiki and manual, etc.) I will then upload the new version also to Visual Studio Gallery, so VS can notify users about the update automatically. Please, feel free to test and report any issues you find. In the meanwhile, you can follow me on twitter, where I post development updates.