Visual Studio 2010 Support For Multiple Monitors!

This will be possible thanks to Visual Studio 2010 providing a new core Shell UI (not to be confused with the Visual Studio Shell available today that you can use to pack your own applications into) based on WPF that will allow for cool stuff as floating tool windows that can be dragged outside the boundaries of the main IDE window.

If you have the Visual Studio 2010 CTP bits installed (download from here) you won't get this out of the box as the default setting is to use the old GDI-based Shell UI. In order to enable it just create a DWORD entry named EnableWPFShell and set it to 1 under the following registry key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0\General

To disable it, just remove the key or set it to 0. Why would you want to disable this very new cool feature? Because the current implementation is veeeery unstable. Just use it to test how moving the windows around and making your favorite layout feels like but for regular usage you will want to disable it. Unstable here includes VS crashing very often, icons showing ugly, some features not working at all, etc.

Here is a screenshot of how it looks like on my laptop with an external monitor, you can see the Object Browser floating around and overlapping the main VS window at the bottom right corner and then, on the second monitor, how the Solution Explorer, Properties window and Error List window are laying around totally outside the main VS window:

dev10-NewShell

If you need a real photo to believe it here it goes:

dev10DualMon

Now imagine some cool predefined layouts that you could customize and that could cover the most common tasks inside VS, like one for reading code, another one for debugging code, etc.

Disclaimer: I know my photographer skills are way under average, no need to remind me of it, my wife does so every single day...

Published Sunday, November 02, 2008 8:03 PM by vga

Comments

# re: Visual Studio 2010 Support For Multiple Monitors!

Monday, November 03, 2008 6:06 AM by Rohland

You can do this already with Visual Studio 2008, you just undock the relevant windows.

# re: Visual Studio 2010 Support For Multiple Monitors!

Tuesday, November 04, 2008 5:15 AM by Glen

You can do this with Visual Studio 2005 & 2008.

What we want is true multi-monitor support which would be to be able to drag our code windows outside of the shell. How about a picture of that?

Most developers with multi-monitors (Which would be most, who in their right mind only uses 1 screen these days) generally maximize VS over both screens then split the code windows vertically and drag the splitter between the 2 monitors.

What would be nice is that the VS IDE has some setting which just does this for you. Not that hard to do.

# re: Visual Studio 2010 Support For Multiple Monitors!

Friday, November 07, 2008 2:26 AM by xblues

Can I undock the code window? What I would really want to do is to put some code windows on one screen, others on the main screen. So I can see multiple windowss of code on multiple screens.

# re: Visual Studio 2010 Support For Multiple Monitors!

Friday, December 19, 2008 8:13 AM by Nick Williams

Umm, we can do this with VS2008 - and it is hardly adequate.

I want to be able to put one code listing on my left monitor, one on middle, and perhaps toolbars and debug on my right monitor.  If you can't take one main-document-page (code listing, web page, form design, etc) and put it on another screen then it is NOT multiple monitor support.

# re: Visual Studio 2010 Support For Multiple Monitors!

Monday, January 05, 2009 4:35 PM by undefined

no - the cool part is that this DOES let you undock the CODE windows =) REALLY NICE! FINALLY!

# re: Visual Studio 2010 Support For Multiple Monitors!

Monday, April 27, 2009 4:50 AM by Moritz Beutel

> Now imagine some cool predefined layouts that you could customize and that could cover the most common tasks inside VS, like one for reading code, another one for debugging code, etc.

Now imagine working with Delphi, which supported this since v5.

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