Virtual Files in Visual Studio

I’d like to see the idea of virtual files be added to the Visual Studio IDE. By this, I mean being able to easily define and assign custom tags to members. A dockable window or top-level menu shows all tags defined in this solution and selecting one or more tags shows me the members with matching tags pulled into a single virtual file or view. For instance, I work on the renderers in Reporting Services that translate the raw report data into nicely paginated and consumer-friendly formats like HTML and PDF. I know that if a bug is found in one place in my code (say, I don’t handle color type 3 PNGs correctly) or if a feature is being added (say, the ability to support textboxes with richer formatting) I need to make change across my various projects. A handy view for me would be to see all routines that deal with image processing. Or those that deal with fonts. Or static structures and accessors that require special multi-threaded safety considerations.

2007-06-07 Virtual Files