While developing large scale applications/solution, We will open many number of files and work with them in visual studio IDE. Out of many number of files if you want to refer a particular file(s) many times, it is bit difficult to access each time with earlier versions (find it from solution or look in opened files) of visual studio. From Visual Studio 2012 IDE, Microsoft has added a new feature called "Pin Tab".Pin Tab:
Pin Tab is an option to pin the files. Pin files are left side of the tabs which can be accessed easily regardless of how many files are opened in the Visual Studio IDE.
How to Pin:
Open File from solution -> Right Click -> Select Pin Tab
Open File from solution -> Window (Menu) -> Select Pin Tab
Open File from solution -> Before Close mark, you can see one more image with alt text as "Toggle Pin Status" --> Click It.
From the above image we can observe
- Solution has 5 sample code files which are opened. We have selected the 3rd file (Sample3.cs) and clicked on "Pin Tab" option. Now the file will be moved to left side of tabs (refer next image).
- If the file is not pinned "Pin Tab Image" shows horizontal side otherwise it shows Vertical.
How to Remove Pin:
Open file from solution -> Right click -> Select Pin Tab (observe "Pin Tab Image" is in highlighted mode)
Open file from solution -> Window(Menu) -> Select Pin Tab
Open file from solution --> Before Close mark you can see one more image with alt text as "Toggle Pin Status" --> Click It.
Close All But Pinned:
In the earlier versions of visual studio we had an option "Close All But this" which closes all other files except the selected one. But if you want keep open more than one file and close all remaining, it is not possible. From visual studio 2012, we have an option "Close All But Pinned" which closes all the files except the pinned files.