How can I stop losing all my IDE window position when pressing the start debugging button ?

Question

I use Visual Studio 2008. I haven't seen this behavior before and, as far as I know, I didn't change anything in the options.

When I press Start debugging all the possibly windows (watch 1 - 4), data sources, properties, registers (to be honest I have not even ever seen these windows before) appear in front of the code window and stay there after I stop the debugger.

Anyone has an idea what could be causing this ? (I am using CodeRush and Refactor for quite a while now)

When I close and restart visual studio all the windows are where they should be.

PS: Previously I have seen normal switching from normal to debug mode and back with some repositioning changes. That is the way it used to work. Now it is not. It has suddenly gone mad and when going to the debug mode it sometimes shows all possible IDE windows and sometimes not. When it does it no longer returns to the previous state. I cannot find this in the options anywhere.

Answer 1

I'm experiencing the same thing - whenever the debugger is running, switching focus back to the IDE immediately caused the debug panel to expand.

I ended up just pinning the debug panel so that it always appears when debugging, and just changing its height as needed.

Answer 2

Visual Studio remembers 2 sets of window layouts, normal mode and debugging mode. My solution is to arrange my normal windows exactly like I want them, then start debugging an application and once again arrange all of the windows the way I want, usually making it as similar to my normal layout as possible, then stopping the debugger and doing a File Exit so that VS saves my settings.

After doing that, it recalls my 2 different layouts each time.

Answer 3

To add to palehorse, another tip is Full Screen mode.