Focus on right section of the solution by Scoping your Solution Explorer in Visual Studio

You may find this tip very handy and useful incase you are dealing with a large solution with several projects in Visual studio.  We don’t work across the solution / all projects together. So it’s is always better to focus on what is important for that time of development. Visual Studio Solution Explorer provides a feature called “Scope To This”, using which you can scope down the view of items with in the solution explorer.

Consider you are working on the following solution which have four different types of projects – iOS, Android, Windows Phone and a Common Portable Library.

Now as a developer of this application you may not look into all these types of projects all together. Let’s say want to specially focus on the “’Windows Phone” project.  In this case you can scope the solution explore to just view this projects.

Related Tip : Keep Track of your active files inside Solution Explorer – A Quick Visual Studio Tip

To do this, right click on the MyPhoneApp.WinPhone Project, and Select “Scope to This”

With this, the view of solution explorer would be scoped to only the MyPhoneApp.WinPhone . Rather scrolling through all the project, you can now specially focus  Windows Phone project.

Similarly you can scoped multiple projects .. ( Let’s say in this case  I would also like to have the portable class library to be in another scoped item)  and click on the “Back”  , “Forward” or Home button to navigate across.

Along with “Scope to This” feature you can also leverage “New Solution Explorer view” to create  new instances of Solution Explorer.

With this you will have two different solution explorer as shown in below screenshot.

This is typically very useful and handy when you are working in a multi-monitor development setup environment; where you can drag the solution explorer to focus on right set of items.

To Summarize, “Scope To This” and  “New Solution Explorer view” are really handy feature of Visual Studio Solution Explorer to focus on right set of items on right time.

Hope this helps !