Summary

In this chapter, you have seen that browsers and explorers are Visual Studio windows that typically provide a hierarchical view of their content. They tend to share common interface elements (tree views, toolbars, and elements), and they are, in effect, the primary means for visualizing and interacting with project elements within the IDE.

Browsers and explorers provide simple point-and-click interfaces for the following:

Visualizing and organizing your solutions and projects on a file-by-file basis

Visualizing and organizing your projects on a type-by-type, class-by-class basis

Querying and interacting with server resources such as databases, performance counters, Azure resources, and message queues

Browsing through type libraries

Although certain browsers/explorers touch underlying concepts that are fairly deep and complicated (WMI, for instance), they are all geared toward a common goal: extending the reach of the IDE as a rapid application development tool for tasks beyond simple code file editing.