Several members of the Whole Tomato Software crew attended the Seattle XNA Gamefest held back in July. It was a great opportunity for us to get face time with quite a few of our customers. We received a lot of feedback some of which has bubbled up in VA X 10.5.
We learned that many Visual Studio users only work in the IDE for editing and debugging but not for doing builds. Because it is not being used for builds, people are working with solutions that are empty or are incomplete, adhoc file collections.
To address editing and navigation productivity in these scenarios, we have added optional support for directory based file discovery. If enabled, VA X will scan for files that are in the same directory as any opened file. Newly discovered files (those which are not already explicitly listed in the solution) are treated as part of the solution in the eyes of VA X. The files are listed in the VA X file lists (OFIS and VA View) and symbols declared in them are listed in the VA X symbol lists (FSIS and VA View).
File discovery is controlled via two settings on the Projects|File Handling node of the VA X Options dialog. The first setting enables this support for only when the loaded solution is empty. The second enables it independently for when files are present in the loaded solution. The first setting is enabled by default whereas the second is disabled. If you use partial solutions as described above, then we recommend enabling the second option.
