One of the new productivity features that helps you manage large solutions is focusing on portion of the solution in Solution Explorer window. Visual Studio has made some good improvements in this area by providing two commands – 1. Scope to this and 2. New Solution Explorer window.
1. Scope to this command : This command navigates the current solution explorer view to the node you have selected. This is like browser based page navigation. It reduces the scope of current view and allows you to go back and forth using forward backward buttons.
2. New Solution Explorer Window: This feature allows you to open a new window with the selected node as the root. You can only see the selected node and items below it. You cannot go back to the solution root from here.
Difference between two commands:
Scope to this helps you focus on part of the entire solution. If your solution has multiple projects and you are working on only one of them, e.g. you are currently developing web interface, you can reduce the scope by using scope to this command. You can always go back to the main solution to start working on another project or part thereof.
New Explorer Window helps you to open a new window with reduced context. This helps you put two contexts side by side and work on them. E.g. I was developing a Entity Framework based code and I wanted to create the POCO entities as well as their maps in two different projects. By opening two windows side by side, I could compare the files and check if I have missed anything and while coding the mappings I could look at the properties of the POCO classes due to improved Solution Explorer view and map them easily w/o missing anything.
Check the images below for more details.
Hope you find this nifty feature useful and code fast and code better.