Ever since my friend Daniel educated me on the great “Open Resource” feature in Eclipse, I decided I needed the same feature in Visual Studio as well. After browsing around, I finally found a comparable plugin called VSFileFinder that will work in Visual Studio. It’s not quite as good, but it’s pretty decent.

For those of you that haven’t seen it, here’s what the Eclipse Open Resource dialog looks like.

And here’s a screenshot of VSFileFinder in action. You’ll notice that it’s very similar, but it doesn’t show open files first.

The first thing you’ll need to do is download and install it from the CodeProject site (registration required). 

Next to set a shortcut key for it, you’ll want to open Tools \ Options and then browse down to Environment \ Keyboard

Now you can set the same keyboard shortcut by typing “vsfile” into the “Show commands” box, clicking on the “VSFileFinder.Connect.ShowVSFileFinder” entry in the list.

Add in the shortcut key you want, and click the Assign button.

Now you have a comparable feature attached to a hotkey. Personally, I docked the window on the side and set it to auto-hide so it works similarly.