Visual Studio Panels

Question

As a .Net developer I spend a large portion of my day working in Visual Studio (2008). While there are a lot of useful functionality inside the IDE, there are many things that I find frustrating on a daily basis.

One of those things are the windows docking and pinning. There are many different windows types (debugging, pending checkins, find results, errors etc), and they are handy to have at a glance. However they are very unpredictable as to where they will be displayed.

For example, if you unpin the find results window (you want to be able to see the current page totally), then the next time you do a search it could be anywhere! Their location and docking type tends to change when running the application, as to when it is stopped.

On occasions opening visual studio will reset all my panels and they will all be everywhere!

What tips do you have for "controlling" these windows from interfering, while being able to use them as they were intended?

What other issues (with windowing) have you found?

Can be for Visual Studio 2005 or 2008.

Answer 1

If you use Tools -> Import and Export Settings.. and export General Settings -> Window Layouts then any time you have the reset issue you can just import your window layouts again.

Personally I have not had any real issues with the Docking system in 2008. Occasionally I misplace something, but you soon learn the keyboard shortcuts to the import ones.

Answer 2

By James Avery:
Visual Studio Add-Ins Every Developer Should Download Now: VSWindowManager PowerToy

The Visual Studio IDE includes a huge number of different Windows, all of which are useful at different times. If you are like me, you have different window layouts that you like to use at various points in your dev work. When I am writing HTML, I like to hide the toolbox and the task list window. When I am designing forms, I want to display the toolbox and the task list. When I am writing code, I like to hide all the windows except for the task list. Having to constantly open, close, and move windows based on what I am doing can be both frustrating and time consuming.

...

VSWindowManager will automatically switch between the design and coding layouts depending on whether you are currently viewing a designer or a code file. You can also use the commands on the Apply Window Layout menu to choose from your currently saved layouts. When you select one of the layouts you have saved, VSWindowManager will automatically hide, show, and rearrange windows so they are in the exact same layout as before.

The link on that page is broken but you can find VSWindowManager on CodePlex.

Edit: Here's a SO question on getting this to work in VS 2008.