Tip 2.23: How to automatically refresh an open document in the editor

“Visual Studio Tips, 251 ways to improve your Productivity in Visual Studio“, courtesy of ‘Sara Ford’

Sara Ford’s Blog

Under Tools–Options–Environment–Documents, there’s the option to Detect When A File Is Changed Outside The Environment. Under it is the second option, to Autoload Changes, If Saved.

Sara Aside She can’t imagine working without having the first check box checked. However, as for the second one, she doesn’t think she’s brave enough to enable it.

If only the first check box is checked, you’ll get this prompt:

If you do a lot of modifying of files outside Visual Studio, she could see this dialog box getting annoying. But since the option is global and sticky across Visual Studio sessions, she wouldn’t want to forget that she had it checked. But then again, this is coming from a very paranoid, risk-averse tester.

Happy Programming! =)