Associate web page with project in Visual Studio

Question

Is there any way to associate a web page with a project in Visual Studio, and have it load up in the IDE? For example, I have a project who's task list is maintained on a web site. It would be ideal to see those tasks within the IDE instead of a separate page. I can accomplish that now by following these steps:

• Press Ctrl-Alt-R to open a Web Browser page
• Change the URL to my desired path
• Position the page as desired (like in its own tab group, off to the right of my code)

It would be nice to have a link somewhere in my project that I could click and open this page in the IDE without changing the URL every time. I have several different projects that would benefit from this. Any ideas?

Answer 1

Nice idea. The only thing that I can think of is via Visual Studio Extensibility. Basically,

• Define an MSBuild property in the project file or a custom field in the solution file that has the project url.
• Write a VS package that subscribes to the solution load event or something similar (I am not familiar with VS object model but I am sure there is an event like that) and looks for that custom field and extracts the url if it exists in the solution or the project file and then opens a web browser within VS that points to that url.

Answer 2

Something like this happens with Visual Studio Team Foundation Server. The various documents and guidance associated with your current Team Project area accessible from within Visual Studio, in the Team Explorer window.

You can also create a Guidance Package to apply various commands and pieces of documentation at appropriate places within your projects. see Guidance Automation Extensions and Guidance Automation Toolkit.

Answer 3

Here's my quick hack around this problem:

1. Create a text file in the project. I called my "notes.txt", and I use it to store notes, ideas, etc. that don't have a home elsewhere in the project.

2. Add the web link to the top of the file.

3. Open the text file in the IDE and put it in a new tab group. I put mine in a vertical tab group off to the right.

4. Drag the separator as far over as it will go to "hide" the tab group. This way it's always open and available but not taking up much space.

5. When you want the web page, "show" the tab group (i.e. drag the separator back) and ctrl-click the link.

This has the added benefit of opening the web page in the same tab group as the text file, so you can push them both aside when not using them.

I'm sure there's more that could be done by writing packages as others have suggested, but this was a low-effort way to get me close enough to what I wanted. I'd love to hear other suggestions or modifications that might make this setup better.