Visual Studio – Pro Tip – Track Active Item in Solution Explorer

Visual Studio Pro Tip

Every time I’m on a new installation of Visual Studio or a new VM (I often quickly ‘generate’ a new VM in order to test things in a clean environment) the first thing I run into is that I just don’t know what’s the file I’m working on and do be more specific, where the file lives in the folder structure of the solution.

Visual Studio has a solution for this, ever since Visual Studio 2005, and it is called Track Active Item in Solution Explorer.

You can find the option in Visual Studio 2017 by going into Tools->Options and search for Solution Explorer. This will give you a couple of entries, now select General under Projects and Solutions and there you have it:

VSTrackActiveItem

You also can go to it directly by going into Tools->Options->Projects and Solutions->General.

If you think this s*cks, just turn it off by unchecking the checkbox before “Track Active Item in Solution Explorer”.

I prefer to check the option to enable it so each time I select a file in one of the tabs, Visual Studio will jump to the location where it is kept in the Solution Explorer!