The problem: I find myself using Visual Studio’s feature “right click -> find all references” a lot, but often times I need to switch between several results which cannot be easily done in Visual Studio.
I’m thinking something like PHP’s Xref utility that generates a cross reference documentation from source code. Is there anything similar for C#?
Other suggestions to solve this problem are also appreciated.
Update: I found Total .NET Xref, but unfortunately it does not support VS2005. Still looking…
Update 2: It seems such tool does not exist (based on my own search and community response), and ReSharper would be the ideal choice for such thing at this moment.
ReSharper and CodeRush/RefactorPro integrate with visual studio and provide better visibility for finding usages and references. They each have a two-panel display with a tree structure of references on the top with code on the bottom.
The ReSharper version has tabs so you can easily switch between several different references – visual studio does not give you a way to have more than one open.
The CodeRush one has a handy feature that it can ‘live sync’ references as you work so whenever you click on a symbol, class, method, etc you can see all of the references in the window. You can turn this off and have it update ‘on command’ where it only tracks the references you choose.
Each of these tools have free trial versions you can try.