VSAid: A Freeware Visual Studio Add-In

VSAid (Visual Studio Aid) is a Microsoft Visual Studio add-in available, at no cost, for both personal and commercial use. Primarily aimed at Visual C++ developers (though useful for any Visual Studio project or solution), VSAid adds a new toolbar to the IDE which adds productivity-enhancing features such as being able to find and open project files quickly and cycle through related files at the click of a mouse button (or the stroke of a key!).

Either read more about VSAid or download it now.

More About VSAid

The new toolbar added to Visual Studio by VSAid contains five buttons.

The VSAid Toolbar

This toolbar provides access to each of the VSAid add-in's features via a single mouse-click. Of course, it is also possible to assign each action to a keyboard shortcut using Visual Studio's keyboard settings.

The features provided by the toolbar buttons are as follows.

Cycle Related Files: At its simplest, this button toggles between related C++ header and implementation files. However, it actually provides more functionality by cycling through a sequence of file extensions and opening the next existing file with the same name but the new extension. The list of extensions used for cycling is user-configurable which makes this a useful feature for any project in any language.
Find Files: Opens a new dialog which lists all the files in the solution. It is possible to type in a filter string to show a matching subset of solution files. The filter string supports partial matching and the asterisk character (*) may be used as a wildcard to match any set of characters. Any number of files may be selected and subsequently opened for editing. This provides a very convenient mechanism for opening one or more files without resorting to browsing through Visual Studio's solution tree.
Locate Active File: Selects and highlights the currently opened file in the solution tree. Tree nodes are expanded as required to ensure that the selected file is visible.
Collapse Solution Tree: Collapses the whole solution tree in a single click. This is good when things get messy and you can't see the solution for the trees!
Options: Shows an options dialog to allow configuration of the add-in's settings.

Download VSAid

VSAid is available to download for several versions of Visual Studio. Each version of the add-in is completely independent and each may be installed and uninstalled separately. In all cases, VSAid is available as a Microsoft Installer (.msi) setup file.

Note: VSAid is not compatible with any Express editions of Visual Studio