{"id":1923,"date":"2010-06-21T17:07:00","date_gmt":"2010-06-21T17:07:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/visualstudio\/2010\/06\/21\/add-references-faster-with-the-new-add-reference-dialog-in-the-productivity-power-tools\/"},"modified":"2019-02-14T15:39:19","modified_gmt":"2019-02-14T23:39:19","slug":"add-references-faster-with-the-new-add-reference-dialog-in-the-productivity-power-tools","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/visualstudio\/add-references-faster-with-the-new-add-reference-dialog-in-the-productivity-power-tools\/","title":{"rendered":"Add References Faster with the new Add Reference Dialog in the Productivity Power Tools"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Two weeks ago, we launched the <a href=\"http:\/\/visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com\/en-us\/d0d33361-18e2-46c0-8ff2-4adea1e34fef\" title=\"Productivity Power Tools\">Productivity Power Tools<\/a> at TechEd North America and the response has been great with over 37000 downloads so far!&nbsp; Many of you also may have noticed that an updated version of the Power Tools was released last week.&nbsp; This update fixed an issue where the extension update check would fail on machines that required proxy credentials and cause Visual Studio to crash.<\/p>\n<p>One of my favorite extensions in the set has to be the new Add Reference extension because it saves me time every day.&nbsp;When you first open the Add Reference Dialog, you&#8217;ll notice a small window that pops up to indicate that it is &#8220;Refreshing References&#8221;.&nbsp; While this window is up, the dialog is generating a cache of your references for the current framework. It&#8217;s a little slow to cache the references but once that&#8217;s done, the dialog should open&nbsp;almost instantly.&nbsp;You will only see this&nbsp;window when&nbsp;a cache update is needed:&nbsp;when you first use a new framework, after installing a new SDK, or when you get an updated build of the Pro Power Tools.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/visualstudio\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2010\/06\/8831.AddRef1.png\" alt=\"Refreshing References in the Pro Power Tools Add Reference Dialog\" style=\"border: 0px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>The Add Reference extension&nbsp;also includes&nbsp;one of the top customer requests that we received while developing Visual Studio 2010:&nbsp; search.&nbsp;The new&nbsp;search box&nbsp;in the upper right hand corner of the dialog allows you to perform a substring search over all of the items in the current pane.&nbsp; This avoids having to navigate through the large list of assemblies and helps you find an assembly even if you can&#8217;t remember its full name.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/visualstudio\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2010\/06\/7774.AddRef2.png\" alt=\"Search Box of Visual Studio 2010 Add Reference Dialog\" style=\"border: 0px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>For Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2, we made the choice to change the default tab for the Add Reference dialog to the Project tab as a way to mitigate the performance of the .NET Tab. Now that we&#8217;ve improved the performance of all of the panes in the new Add Reference Dialog, we made the choice to switch this back to the Assemblies pane.&nbsp;We&#8217;ve received quite a bit of feedback from people who preferred the Projects tab, which I&#8217;d like to understand better.&nbsp; In my experience most of the references that are added to my projects are from the assemblies tab and project-to-project references are less common.&nbsp;Are there other benefits to starting with the Projects pane?&nbsp; Please leave us comments on this post so we can tune the default tab experience.<\/p>\n<p>Finally, I&nbsp;would like to thank Kieran Mockford &amp; Ion Todirel for their hard work on the Add Reference dialog extension.&nbsp;Their effort (much of it during their spare time) has greatly improved the experience of adding&nbsp;references for everyone.&nbsp; <\/p>\n<p>Sean Laberee<br \/>Program Manager Lead<br \/>VSPro Team<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Two weeks ago, we launched the Productivity Power Tools at TechEd North America and the response has been great with over 37000 downloads so far!&nbsp; Many of you also may have noticed that an updated version of the Power Tools was released last week.&nbsp; This update fixed an issue where the extension update check would [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":255385,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[155],"tags":[294,53,526,13],"class_list":["post-1923","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-visual-studio","tag-extensions","tag-performance","tag-productivity","tag-visual-studio-2010"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>Two weeks ago, we launched the Productivity Power Tools at TechEd North America and the response has been great with over 37000 downloads so far!&nbsp; Many of you also may have noticed that an updated version of the Power Tools was released last week.&nbsp; This update fixed an issue where the extension update check would [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/visualstudio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1923","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/visualstudio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/visualstudio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/visualstudio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/visualstudio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1923"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/visualstudio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1923\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/visualstudio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/255385"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/visualstudio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1923"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/visualstudio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1923"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/visualstudio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1923"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}