Last week a co worker of mine who wanted to remain anonymous, ran into the weirdest problem. She tried to use the “find in files” option in Visual Studio 2005 and even though the searched expression was out there in one of the files, she got the following result: “No files were found to look in. Find was stopped in progress.”

You can close Visual Studio, restart your computer or jump three times on one leg, but the problem remains. This is a very strange and odd bug, but fortunately there is a solution: press…

When we work on big projects, there is a need to set up a development tree (directory structure) and not just put everything in the bin\Debug or bin\Release folder. There are some “how to set up a good development tree” best practices and even a .NET development tree generator called Tree Surgeon. Some of the folders in this directory structure shall be “Resources” (set of icons and images) and “Config” (set of configuration files).

How many times did you search for a specific configuration file or a specific icon in the development tree (assuming it is a big one)? You come back to a component you wrote several years ago and can’t recall where did you locate your files. Wouldn’t it be nice if for each project, our resources and configuration files could be seen form visual studio? We would never need to find them using the windows explorer anymore and we will always have them right there even when coming back to a code which was written 2-3 years ago.