The official source of product insight from the Visual Studio Engineering Team
Adrian Collier – Program Manager, Visual Studio Shell Team Short Bio: I started at Microsoft as an intern in 2004 back in the UK and crossed the pond last year to work on Popfly, since then I’ve been working in Visual Studio land primarily working on the Start Page and window management areas if the IDE.
Aero Snapping allows you to easily dock windows side-by-side, move a window to another monitor or simply maximize/minimize using a mouse or keyboard gestures. For more information on the Aero Snap feature in Windows check out this these videos.
Below are the keyboard shortcuts for interacting with floating VS windows.
Command
Shortcut
Notes
Maximize
Windows + Up Arrow
Restore
Windows + Down Arrow
Minimize – from windowed state.
This command only works on the main Visual Studio IDE.
Dock to Screen Left
Windows + Left Arrow
(This command can also be used to cycle through the various docked states across multiple monitors)
Dock to Screen Right
Windows + Right Arrow
Expand Height
Windows + Shift + Up Arrow
Move Window to 2nd Monitor on left of primary display
Windows + Shift + Left Arrow
Move Window to 2nd Monitor on right of primary display
Windows + Shift + Right Arrow
Unfortunately, no. Since all floating windows are “owned” by Visual Studio and cannot be minimized individually, shaking a floating window will only result in minimizing other applications.
We will be following up with more posts on how to become more productive with Visual Studio by taking advantage of shortcuts and less well known Visual Studio features.
Adrian Collier Program Manager, Visual Studio Shell Team
Hi Adrian, very cool that you enabled us to use the popular Win7 shortcuts, thank you very much! :)
What I didn't manage yet is to create a tab group on a secondary screen. Is this possible at all? Because, as you can imagine, I don't want to have a single editor window on my 1920x1600 secondary screen - I'd rather like multiple such windows with tabs at the top for switching between them.
Best regards, Ooh
Any chance of supporting more Win7 features like jumplists and progress bars in the taskbar?
>What I didn't manage yet is to create a tab group on a secondary screen. Is this possible at all?
Do you mean a tab group consisting solely of documents? Unfortunately tear off documents can't be docked with any other elements (other documents or toolwindows) in Dev10.
@anonymous:
We do display your recent projects, solution, and files in the Win7 jumplist. We didn't have the bandwidth to integrate common tasks into the jump list but we investigating releasing an out-of-band extension that would allow you to do this. If it materializes, we'll blog about it here.
As for the progress bar, we don't have support for the IDE or its packages to leverage the Win7 taskbar functionality. We did investigate this, but found that it was too costly for this release. This is something that we'll consider for a future version.
Thanks,
Weston Hutchins
Program Manager - VSP Shell
@Ryan: Yep, that's exactly what I expected from the new docking system. Hopefully it'll be in in v.Next.
Thanks, Ooh
@ooh
Yes, it was a sad day in Redmond when we realized we didn't have the bandwidth for docking floating documents with our other responsibilities. I can't promise anything in v.Next (since I am but a dev peon), but I can say it will certainly be amongst the ideas discussed in Dev11 planning. I'll add your +1 to that discussion :)
Ryan