Like most of us, I too am a lazy developer. I'll do pretty much anything I can to make my life easier. One of the annoyances is not having quick access to my project folders in Visual Studio. This is because I don't store my code in the Visual Studio Projects under My Documents. Also, I have complicated hierarchy that separates internal projects from projects for our clients so I often find myself backing up the folder tree to the common top-level folder. The Open Project and Open File dialogs in Visual Studio have an area to the left called the My Places bar. Did you know you can customize this? Well, you can and here is how.
You can add your own places to the My Places bar being modifiying the registry hive for Visual Studio. The key you want to modify is:
HKCU\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0\Open Find\Places\UserDefinedPlaces
Under this key, create an new key, Place0, and add two string values: Name and Path. The Name value is the text that will be displayed in the Visual Studio dialogs. The Path is the location in the file system the place will point at. You can create additional places by creating additional keys under UserDefinedPlaces and incrementing the index in the key name (e.g. Place1, Place2, etc.). It's important to remember that Visual Studio must be closed before making these changes to registry. If you don't to this, they will be lost when you do close Visual Studio.
Below is an example registry script I used to add the Clients shortcut to the My Places bar:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0\Open Find\Places\UserDefinedPlaces\Place0]
"Name"="Clients"
"Path"="D:\\Work\\OpenNETCF\\Clients"
And here is what the My Places bar looks like after I've made my customizations:
