I was in Perth a few weeks back and whilst there I had the opportunity to watch a presentation by Charles Sterling on what he likes in ASP.NET 2.0. Chuck showed some great stuff - although in my case - he was preaching to the converted, I fell in love with ASP.NET 2.0 over a year ago.

Anyway, tonight whilst sitting in my hotel room I got to thinking about all the little features that the folks in Redmond have put in to Visual Studio 2005 for us. Over the past week or so I have posted up a few bits and pieces that I have found, I thought I might take the time to post a few more of these and associate them with this category in .Text. Kind of a living list of my little finds. If you have one feel free to send me an e-mail at and I will post it up.

I'm doing this for a couple of reasons, firstly, my blog is my long-term memory, and I don't want to forget about these little things. Secondly, its a nod of appreciation to all the PM's, SDE's and SDE/T's over there putting this all together for us.

So - what is the feature I am going to talk about in this post? Well, its one that I picked up from Josh Ledgard's latest post on the "Open Containing Folder" item on the context menu for document tabs in the IDE.

Pretty neat I thought. And something that I typically have a command-prompt over for all the time. Now I don't have to bother.

P.S. Hang on - I said command-prompt, that opens a folder in Windows Explorer. Yep - thats right, it ties in to some of the changes that I am trying to make in my working habits. Instead of using the command-prompt I am going to start learning how to navigate the shell itself via the keyboard. One my colleagues (Martin Granell) can use Windows very effectively with a keyboard - it is truly a sight to behold.