Christian Wilkie
Christian Wilkie

Reputation: 3823

Visual Studio 2013 "Show All Files" button is missing

By default Visual Studio organizes my project like this:

Solution Explorer with no Show All Files button

However, this view is confusing to me from an organizational perspective as "Source Files" and "Header Files" appear to be folders but are not actual folders on the disk. I read online that there is supposed to be a "Show All Files" button on the Solution Explorer that changes this view but none of my buttons seemed to be labeled that. How can I enable the "Show All Files" view? Sorry if I'm missing something obvious, I'm new to using Visual Studio.

Upvotes: 32

Views: 20618

Answers (2)

Mohamed Ali
Mohamed Ali

Reputation: 3995

It didn't work for me, but if it's all about including an existing file to the project, you can copy the file or folder from the Explorer and right click the parent folder (the same folder it exists in) in Visual Studio Solution Explorer and click paste.

Upvotes: 0

Christian Wilkie
Christian Wilkie

Reputation: 3823

It turns out the issue was that the "Show All Files" button does not appear if you are selecting the Solution itself. If you select an underlying Project, or any of the folders/files in the project, the button will display:

Show All Files button

And here is the Solution Explorer view after clicking the button:

Show All Files view in the Solution Explorer

Note: see also this post for a solution for Visual Studio 2012, which didn't solve my problem but is closely related.

Upvotes: 65

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