Do you know that you can increase the list of recent files and projects shown in the Visual Studio File menu?

Those who always work with lots of projects in Visual Studio, its easy for them to switch from one project to the other by navigating through the File menu. This reduces the number of running Visual Studio instances.

In this part of my Visual Studio Productivity Tips series, we will learn how to increase or decrease the recent files and projects in Visual Studio MRU list.

Visual Studio Productivity Tips:

• Cycle Clipboard Ring feature to perform multiple copy/paste
• Limit search results to filename only
• Move between methods and properties efficiently
• Assigning keyboard shortcuts to Visual Studio command menus
• Adding and deleting text at multiple caret positions
• Create a project from existing code
• How to increase the list of recent files and projects shown in the Visual Studio File menu?

MRU stands for Most Recently Used files list. If you are handling a no. of projects and/or code files frequently, its easy for you to switch from one to another using the MRU list that Visual Studio maintains.

You can access the recent files by navigating to Visual Studio menu: File | Recent Files. Similarly, you can access the recent projects and solution by navigating to the following Visual Studio menu: File | Recent Projects and Solutions.

If you are using this list frequently, you might have already noticed that, there is a 10 files limitation to the history of the MRU that Visual Studio remembers. If you would list to change the number (either increase or decrease), you can do so by following the below mentioned steps:

1. Navigate to the Visual Studio menu: Tools | Options..., as shown in the below screenshot:
   
   
   
   
2. Now, from the left side navigation links, navigate to Environment | General.
   
   
3. As shown below, if you would like to set (increase or decrease) the maximum count of most recently used files, change the Items to show in recently used files list input box.
   
   
   
   Please note that the most recently used list can contain 1 - 24 files only.
   
   
4. Once done, click OK to save the changes.