If you've ever used Eclipse, you've probably noticed the great keyboard shortcuts that let you hit a shortcut key combination, then just type the first few characters of a function, class, filename, etc. It's even smart enough to put open files first in the list.
I'm looking for a similar functionality for Visual Studio 2008. I know there's a findfiles plugin on codeproject, but that one is buggy and a little weird, and doesn't give me access to functions or classes.
Some of the neat features are available in Visual Assist X, though not all of them. I've asked on their forums, but they haven't appeared as yet. VAX gets updated regularly on a rough 4 week period for bug fixes and a new feature every couple of months.
Resharper does this with the Ctrl-N keyword. Unfortunately it doesn't come for free.
Visual Studio doesn't have anything like this feature beyond Find.
Are you looking for an add-in like this to quickly navigate to a source file in your project:
You can try free Visual Studio 2005/2008 add-in SonicFileFinder.
This isn't exactly the same as Eclipse from your description, but Visual Studio has some similar features out of the box (I've never used Visual Assist X, but it does sound interesting).
The Find ComboBox in the toolbar ends up being a sort of "Visual Studio command line". You can press Ctrl+/ (by default) to set focus there, and Visual Studio will insert an ">" at the beginning of the text (indicating that you want to enter a command instead of search). It even auto-completes as you type, helping you to find commands.
Anyway, to open a file from there, type "open <filename>". It will display any matching files in the drop down as you type (it pulls the list of files from the currently open solution).
To quickly navigate to a function, in the code editor press Ctrl+I to start an incremental search. Then just start typing until you find what you are looking for. Press Escape to cancel the search, or F3 to search again using the same query. As you are typing in the search query, the status bar in the lower left corner will contain what Visual Studio is searching for. Granted, this won't search across multiple files (I've never used Eclipse much, but that sounds like what it does from your description), but hopefully it will help you at least a little bit.
I have been using biterScripting along with Visual Studio to do more flexible searching and manipulation.
It can search the entire workspace.
It can search within any project - EVEN IF THAT PROJECT IS NOT LOADED OR EVEN PART OF A WORKSPACE.
It can find things using regular expressions.
AND, ABOVE ALL, it can make bulk changes. For example, want to change the name of a class from CCustomer to CUser, I can do it in just a few command lines - Actually, I have written scripts for things like this I do often. I DON'T HAVE TO CLICK ON EACH INSTANCE AND MANUALLY DO THE CHANGE.
And, it is inexpensive ($0). I downloaded it from http://www.biterscripting.com .
Mike
Hi. If anyone stumbles upon this thread:
There's a free plugin (created by me) for Visual Studio 2008 that mimics the Eclipse Ctrl+Shift+R Open Resource dialog (note, not the Open Type dialog). It works with any language and/or project type.
You can find it at Visual Studio Gallery.
Cheers, Martin