Visual Studio - purpose of 'Refresh' button in solution explorer

Question

Hi folks,

what's the purpose of the 'Refresh' command on the solution explorer window? (When we select a project, the button is enabled)

TIA

Answer 1

Its really helpful when you have Show All Files is turned on in a Web application project (this might work for other project types). With the Refresh, you can see files added on the file system level and right-click them to include them in your project.

Answer 2

This may be an overly simple response, but I use the refresh button quite often to populate the Solution Explorer with files that have been created outside of VS.

For example, I use a separate IDE to do my Actionscript work where lots of files get added which VS is not aware of until I refresh the solution explorer window. After they appear, I can now commit them to SourceSafe.