Visual Studio Solution Explorer tip: paste files and folders to your project directly from Windows File Explorer

Today's blog post contains a quick Visual Studio tip: if you need to quickly add existing files to your Visual Studio projects, often the fastest way to do so is not through Solution Explorer's own popup menu, but rather directly from the Windows File Explorer (which used to be called Resource Explorer).

For instance, if you have a folder which contains image files and sub-folders for even more images, using the Visual Studio's Add Existing Files command only allows you to add files in a single folder at a time.

However, if you select multiple files and folders from the File Explorer and copy them to the clipboard, you can easily paste them into Solution Explorer. All selected files and sub-folders will properly get copied to the correct location and included in the project (and source control, if your project is associated with one).

Remember that in addition to using the clipboard (copy-paste), you can also drag and drop files from File Explorer to Visual Studio's Solution Explorer.

Hope this helps!