Visual Studio 2008: Clean up your “Recent Projects Sidebar”

kennydust — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 12:57:00 GMT

As a developer, you create many projects and open many more third party projects files over the course of your development career. In doing so however, your “Recent Projects” sidebar in the startpage in VS 2008 becomes cluttered with some things that end up being temporary anyways. Here’s how to clean it up:

Open regedit.

Navigate through the registry to this spot:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\ProjectMRUList

and you’ll see a list that looks similar to this:

File1 Reg_Expand_Sx Path
File2 Reg_Expand_Sx Path 
File3 Reg_Expand_Sx Path
File4 Reg_Expand_Sx Path

You need to delete the values you don’t want, and then rename all the remaining ones (that you want to keep) in sequential order, while ensuring there are no gaps in between.

Visual Studio 2008: Tracking active item in the Solution Explorer

kennydust — Wed, 20 May 2009 13:04:00 GMT

I've recently made the switch to VS 2008 and noticed that the active file is not highlighted in the docked solution explorer. Being that I work with multiple projects and countless hundreds of class files -- this became somewhat cumbersome; it's necessary for me refer to the file hierarchy and the current project 30% of the time. After some digging around, I discovered that VS 2008 does not enable this feature by default (this was the case for VS 2005); In order to fix this, you need to go into the Tools -> Options -> Projects and Solutions and check off the following:

VisualStudio - Kennydust

Visual Studio 2008: Clean up your “Recent Projects Sidebar”

Visual Studio 2008: Tracking active item in the Solution Explorer