Date: 2/17/2003
Versions: VS7 Level: Beginner
Author: The VB2TheMax Team

Say that that you have an existing Visual Studio .NET project, and that you copy a lot of new source code files, images and other stuff from another project (maybe you're merging two projects, or a colleague wrote and passed those files to you). One approach to include the new files is to use the Project | Add Existing Item… command and select all the files you want to include in the current project. Unfortunately this is quite long if the files are organized in a lot of sub-directories, and even more if you want to first check the content of the file, and eventually add the ones you need. A much simpler approach is the following: by clicking the Project | Show all files command the Solution Explorer will be filled with all the files and directories located under the project's main directory, allowing to easily browse the sub-directories, and to open the source code files to read their content, without actually adding them to the project. When you find the files you need, simply right click on them in the Solution Explorer, and select Include In Project. If you later want to remove a file from the project, without physically deleting it, right click on the file and select Exclude From Project.