I find myself routinely addressing different aspects of a very large code base. Having a browser style bookmarks toolbar would allow me to work more efficiently.
What do you mean by "browser style bookmarks toolbar" ? Can you explain this concept?
Are you aware of IDE's bookmark functionality? You can place bookmarks by Edit.ToogleBookmark (Ctrl+F2 by default if I remember correctly). You can also jump to next or previous bookmarks by Edit.NextBookmark and Edit.PreviousBookmark (F2 and Shift+F2).
Sorry I should have been more clear. If you look at Firefox's "Bookmarks Toolbar" it allows you to drag and drop the "favicon" icon to the left of the URL onto that toolbar generating a shortcut button to the page currently displayed. Right-clicking on the toolbar provides a context menu that allows you to add folders that links can be dropped into and links can be dragged between folders, subfolders etc.
Providing this functionality allows the user to quickly create a custom menu of shortcuts which is useful when revisiting an area of the code-base that you haven't been in a while. E.g. I'm working on a project with approximately 30,000 files, and moving to a new area every few weeks. By comparison the existing bookmarks functionality is really only useful for flipping through your current "working set."
Which Visual Studio do you use? There is such a functionality already in VS2008. Select
IDE View menu -> Bookmark window
to open it. You can create named bookmarks here and even you can create subfolders and drag bookmarks into them. Just checked, and this is also available in VS 2005.
Hmm, while it performs the same function, it wastes screen real estate and requires a lot more mousing around to use. Needing to manually label each file is particularly silly.
You can set the bookmark window to autohide if it is docked along one side of the IDE, and you can access it with a keyboard shortcut, although you may have to configure this in the IDE keyboard settings.
bookmarks
Posted - Jan 07 2009 : 2:21:29 PM
