The SP Farm explorer tool pane comes in handy if you want to explorer the farm you are connected to, either by project configuration or manual connection. It supports both local and remote farm browsing. Remote requires the SPVisualDev windows service to be installed and running. The default port for the service is 5667.

You can activate the window by:

The farm explorer tool pane is shared along with the push down manager view. Here you can select which folder that would be automatically synced with the SharePoint 12 hive when saving, adding, deleting items in your project.

farmexplorer.png