Use Visual Studio 2005 to browse existing code

Over the last year I’ve downloaded the source for many popular open source tools like Gaim, eMule, Mozilla etc. in order to read the code. One big problem I always faced coming from a Visual Studio background was the lack of a solution or workspace kind of concept that allows for easier code browsing. Today after reading a bit about ctags and wondering if I should give XEmacs yet another try I stumbled upon a cool new feature in VS 2005 “New project from existing code”, this is accessible via File->New->Project from existing code. It allows you to specify the folders where the source is available and also allows you to customize the build commands that are used, so you can actually use the makefiles that ship with the source to build rather than using VS. Intellisense in 2005 is damn good and now finally I can browse the code in an environment that I am very familiar with.