Visual Studio 2003 tip #1: Stop the solution explorer flashiness when opening a project!

A quick note on why I blog about Visual Studio 2003 aka Everett -

• Its a released product so devs are probably interested in knowing its power features and tips and tricks.
• I was heavily involved in getting it released for the C# team, so I have a somewhat sentimental attachment to the product.

Ok, so onto tip#1. One of the complaints we got in Vs7 was that if you had a multi project solution, with many files open in it and you reload the solution, the solution explorer just flashes around for a while. This is happening because the project system tracks the active file as it opens it and it scrolls back and forth among the files in the solution explorer giving it this flashy appearance. A number of customers complained about this, so we provided a setting to turn it off. This is under Tools.Options.Environment.Projects and Solutions.Track Active item in Solution explorer. Go ahead and uncheck that. Voila, less eye strain.

Comments

• Anonymous
  February 13, 2004
  hmm. I have that unchecked for ages, but when I load a 10 project solution that's in sourcesafe, the solution explorer flashes a lot. Not that it bothers me, I just wondered why unchecking that checkbox isn't limiting the flashing here... :)
• Anonymous
  February 13, 2004
  And on another note: what am I giving up by turning that option off?
• Anonymous
  February 13, 2004
  The comment has been removed
• Anonymous
  February 13, 2004
  Ah, ok. To answer Frans & Michaels questions - perhaps by flashiness Frans you mean the redraw that happens when you open a large project? I realized that my posting is unclear - the flashiness that I refer to is the different files being highlighted as the editor cycles through them to open them.
  Thats essentially what Track Active Item does - when you select a file tab in the editor, it highlights the file in solution explorer. So when you open all these files, the highlight goes back and forth, and opens projects that may be closed - causing a flashiness. When you turn the setting off, the active file isnt selected in the editor anymore.
• Anonymous
  March 02, 2004
  The comment has been removed
• Anonymous
  March 03, 2004
  Chris' request seems like a candidate for a dev studio macro to me..
  
• Anonymous
  March 04, 2004
  Is there any way to improve the scroilling performace of the class view? Scrolling class view in a project with several hundred classes is excruciatingly sloooow...
  
• Anonymous
  March 28, 2004
  LSN WebLog » Shaykat’s Visual Studio 2003 Tips
• Anonymous
  April 14, 2004
  yes I aggree.