Public Class GeoffAppleby

The most useful tip i'll ever get.

There's one thing that has annoyed me for a long time in Visual Studio.

Now, some of you might know the answer to this already, but no one I know does, which goes to show you just how blind some of us are :)

Let's say i have a project that includes many class files (strangely enough, it was for a class library).

Now let's say i have a different project (different solution) in which i want to use one of those classes, but not weigh myself down with the size of the whole class library.

So I go to add an existing item to the new project, and select the source file from the first project. What happens? The file gets copied into the project! So much for maintainability!

This has always irritated me to no end.

So what did i finally discover? Something that has been staring me in the face since VS.net came out.

Note the highlighted menu item? You can link a file in! This means it uses it in place where it was instead of getting a copy made. I've never before tried clicking the dropdown next to the open button before. I've seen it, but always ignored it - it just never registered to me as something worth noticing.

I think i can code very well, but it just goes to show what you miss when you don't learn your tools properly. On that note, this is where i admit that i can't use MS Word or Excel either :)

Kudos to Rory for discovering this. He doesn't have a blog (that i know of) so i can't link to him. Shame shame shame! :)

Edit: thanks to a friendly spelling nazi, i fixed a typo. I mean really, you know what i meant right? Who needs spell checkers! Bah! Also, this apparently doesn't exist in VS.net 2002. Oh well. :)