Visual Studio 2010: Close all documents

Sometimes it’s the little things that make you love a new product just a bit more.

I tend to close stuff I don’t use anymore fairly quickly. Sometimes I even close an Explorer window or an application right after I used it, only to find I need it again in a few moments… We all have our quirks, right 😉

While developing I regularly close all the documents I have open in Visual Studio, especially when I am done with a specific task. And most of the time, I like to collapse all the projects and their subfolders too to keep a tidy work environment. I also have the option ‘Track Active Item in Solution Explorer’ checked under ‘Tools’ – ‘Options’ – ‘Projects and solutions’ – ‘General’. Of course I have, I’d almost add…

In older versions of Visual Studio (while having the ‘Track Active Item in Solution Explorer’ option turned on) choosing the ‘Close all documents’ item in the ‘Windows’ menu after having collapsed all the projects lead to one project opening up again. That was the project with the document that was active just before closing all the documents. The ‘Track Active Item in Solution Explorer’ option seemed to squeeze in a ‘Look at that guy!’ just before all the documents actually closed, making Visual Studio open up the project and highlighting the file again. Although I knew this happened, I somehow kept to my usual routine of collapsing all the projects and their subfolders before closing all documents, with the same result each time: me closing that one project (or those seven subfolders) twice.

But…… no more in Visual Studio 2010! This newly built IDE seems to understand my way of work: no longer does Visual Studio (or the ‘Track Active Item in Solution Explorer’ option) open up the project of an active item when I choose ‘Close All Documents’. I’m not even sure if this was a specific choice or just a coincidental side-effect of the new IDE, but it makes me love Visual Studio 2010 just a bit more… 🙂

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