Dock, float, and size your windows, and save a layout for every mode and mood.
Visual Studio contains many ways to customize your workspace. Every window can be moved, docked, or hidden. Visual Studio includes different window layouts for different modes; modifying a window layout during debug mode will not affect your window layout while coding. There is even a full-screen mode. This hack delves into all the ways you can take control of your workspace.
Visual Studio provides a plethora of windows that you can move around the IDE. Windows have a number of different states; they can be floating, docked, hidden, or in auto hide mode. Understanding these different states and how changes you make are saved is important to getting the most out of the Visual Studio IDE.
Window state is controlled by right-clicking on the window titlebar and selecting the state (see Figure 3-1) or by selecting a window option while the focus is on the window you want to change. Each of these states affects how the window behaves.
This is the default state for most windows. When a window is set to be dockable, it can either float above other windows or be docked to the edges of the IDE window. To dock a window, you simply need to drag that window and, following the bold outline, choose where you want the window to be docked. When a window is docked, it will resize with and react to the other windows around it (including the IDE main window). Visual Studio 2005 includes a new method for docking that makes it easier to determine where that window will actually be docked. Figure 3-2 shows an example of the new docking interface.
The new interface makes it easier to determine where you are docking something. You can simply move your cursor over one of the blue icons and the window will dock there. Dropping it in the center circle will cause it to become a tabbed document along with the source code files.
Windows can be set to dockable but still be floating windows; dockable just means that you can dock them if you want to. Holding Ctrl while dragging the window will prevent it from docking so you can place it over a dock location without it docking to that location.
If a window is set to floating, it cannot be docked. It will float right above the IDE and will always be on top of any docked windows below it.
Hiding a window simply means that it is not shown on your screen anywhere. It is the same as closing the window. If you hide a window, you can always show it again by going to View and then selecting the window in that list or under the Other Windows menu option.
Auto hide is a very cool feature that is best used through the little pin icon that appears on the menu at the top of each window. Click the pin when the window is docked to hide it; it will be replaced by a small vertical menu on the side of the screen. You can then click or hover over the icon on the vertical menu to make the window slide back into view; it will disappear a few seconds after you stop using it. Clicking on the pin again will pin it back on the IDE.
Visual Studio 2005 introduces the ability to add a regular window as a tabbed document. To do this, right-click on the window and choose Tabbed Document from the context menu or drag the window to the blue round icon in the center, as shown in Figure 3-2. The window will now appear next to your code files in the document window.
As you move around and customize your window layout, you may notice that sometimes your changes are undone or they change in certain situations. This is because Visual Studio uses different layouts that are active at different times (debug, full screen, etc.). Window layouts are stored for each user on a machine in a file called devenv.xml .
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By default, the devenv.xml file contains a number of different window layouts, including design layouts for each of the different languages as well as debug and full-screen layouts. Any changes you make to the window layouts are saved in this file and are remembered the next time you start Visual Studio. When you are in debug mode, any changes you make to the window layout will affect only the debug windows layout. Next time you enter debug mode, all of your windows will be in the same place. The other two main window layouts are design and full screen.
You can also create your own custom window layouts using the VSWindowManage power toy [Hack #26] .
The document window is the window you use to edit a file. Each time you open a new document, a new tab is created on the tab bar across the top of this window. The document window is one of the places where you will spend a lot of time when working with Visual Studio, and these shortcuts and features will make working with the window faster and easier.
You can easily move between open documents using the Window. NextDocumentWindow (Ctrl-Tab or Ctrl-F6) and Window.PreviousDocumentWindow (Ctrl-Shift-Tab or Ctrl-Shift-F6) commands. These two commands allow you to quickly switch between documents without the use of a mouse, and since they are similar to the Windows Alt-Tab command, they are easy to remember. You can also close the current document window with the Window. CloseDocumentWindow (Ctrl-F4) command, also similar to the Alt-F4 command used in Windows.
The Ctrl-Tab shortcut performs an additional action in Visual Studio 2005. It pops up a dialog (similar to the Windows Alt-Tab dialog) that shows all of the open documents. This new dialog can be seen in Figure 3-3.
Using this dialog, you can choose which file to open using the arrow keys or pressing Ctrl-Tab again. You can also use the arrow keys to select a tool window that you want to switch to.
Tabs are all over Visual Studio. One of the most common places you find tabs is when you dock multiple windows in the same spot. Visual Studio will create a tab list of all the different windows you have docked. Two shortcuts can be used to quickly toggle between tabs. The first is Window.NextTab (Ctrl-PageDown) and the second is Window.PreviousTab (Ctrl-PageUp). You can use these shortcuts any time the focus is set on a window that has tabs (for example, on the Solution Explorer window, you can use these shortcuts to toggle between the Solution Explorer, class view, etc.).
When in the document view, these commands do not change the tabs that are across the top of the document window, but rather the tabs that sometimes appear at the bottom of the document window. For example, when working with a file type that includes a designer, such as an ASP.NET file, there are two tabs at the bottom of the window (one for the design view and one for the HTML view). Use the keystrokes described in the previous section to move between the tabs across the top of the windowthese are considered document windows.
A pane is defined as any of the windows you can move and dock. The solution explorer, class view, and task list are all panes. Two commands can be used to quickly move between all the panes currently open in the IDE: Window.NextPane (Alt-F6) and Window.PreviousPane (Alt-Shift-F6). Both of these commands let you move around the IDE quickly and easily, without picking up your mouse.
You can
split a document by grabbing the small
bar at the top of the scrollbar with the mouse and then dragging down
or by selecting the Window
Two
shortcut commands also allow
you to move between split panes: Window.NextSplitPane (F6) and
Window.PreviousSplitPane (Shift-F6). When you are done working in
split-pane mode, you simply need to drag the window separator all the
way up to the top of the window or select the Window
Visual Studio includes a
full-screen mode that can be toggled using
the View.FullScreen command, by either using the
Shift-Alt-Enter keystroke or clicking
View
As you can see, full-screen mode hides all the other windows and provides an incredible amount of space for just coding. I frequently find myself using full-screen mode whenever I am focusing on writing code, and I really enjoy the added real estate in the editor window. The same keystroke (Shift-Alt-Enter) switches you back out of full-screen mode.