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Sara Ford's Weblog

My adventures embracing open source on CodePlex and at Microsoft

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Did you know... You can auto-hide all of your tool windows with one command? - #130

Update 17 Jan 2008:  Note there isn't a way to re-show all your tool windows, when you apply this command. However, i've posted a workaround - which requires you to export and reimport your settings before you play with auto-hide all.

 Happy Birthday Mom!!  My Tip of the Day Readers - leave a comment here wishing my mom happy birthday.  Yes, she reads my blog, but mostly for the comments to see what people thought of the tip.  that's what she told me, anyways...

On the Window menu, there's the Auto Hide All command.  Your environment can go from looking like this

Visual Studio Environment with tons of tool windows 

to looking like this

Visual Studio environment with all visible tool windows hiding 

sweet.

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Posted: Wednesday, January 16, 2008 3:00 AM by saraford

Comments

MSDN Blog Postings » 2008 » January » 16 said:

PingBack from http://msdnrss.thecoderblogs.com/2008/01/16/

# January 16, 2008 6:48 AM

Manuel said:

Happy Birthday Sara's mother!!

(thank you for the tips)

# January 16, 2008 7:41 AM

Alena said:

Happy Birthday to your mom! =)

pingback from: http://teamexpand.com/ext/component/option,com_mojo/Itemid,3/p,24/#respond

# January 16, 2008 7:56 AM

Milan said:

Hi Sara,

Although I read every tip you post I do not comment because they are well explained, useful and ease to follow. I refrain from posting "nice", "keep it up", "good job".

Anyway as today is special day I want to say for your posts: nice, keep it up, good job.

Also, happy birthday Sara's Mom! I wish you to read your daughter's tips many many more years in good health and happiness.

# January 16, 2008 8:06 AM

Jigar Mehta said:

This is really cool..

I never noticed this menu option.. You saved my occassional 2 seconds. :)

# January 16, 2008 8:19 AM

Niels Ladegaard Beck said:

Happy birthday, Sara's mom! :-)

And Sara, keep up the good work!

# January 16, 2008 8:49 AM

Simon said:

Happy birthday Sara Ford's mom :)

Now if only I could prevent certain tool windows not realising they aren't needed when set to auto-hide (whilst retaining the setting itself) and showing themselves till you toggle it.  It seems to happen a lot with server explorer.

# January 16, 2008 9:27 AM

Skip Valentine said:

Your little Sara has quite a following of us computer nerds (she's like a geek magnet!! !-).

We'd all be fumblin' around inefficiently, overlooking most of the cool little things in our IDE's if it wasn't for her.

Have a happy B-Day, from Texas!!!

# January 16, 2008 9:31 AM

Dave Gardner said:

Happy Birthday from Perth, Australia!

# January 16, 2008 9:37 AM

Gerhard said:

I used the "Auto Hide All" and it worked pretty nice. Of course the next step was to Undo the "Auto Hide All", which looks like the "Reset Window Layout" should do that but it did not work. Only the Solution Explorer came back. The Tool Box stayed hidden (I had manually unhide), the Error List window was closed completely along with my CodeRush window. Both of these windows I had to open manually then re-dock them to their correct locations.

Is there a way to Undo the "Auto Hide All", which will re-open all the Windows that where hidden to their last docked location?

Also, Happy B-day Sara’s Mom, lots of thanks go out to you for raising such a colorful daughter.

# January 16, 2008 9:41 AM

Stuart said:

Happy birthday Sara's mom!

Like a lot of other people here I don't usually comment but I do frequently find the tips really useful. Today's was a little dangerous though! If you have your IDE set up a particular way that you like, with some stuff autohiding and some not, this option is a great way to throw away all that information with no way to get it back, other than by hand.

Handy tip, but it should come with a warning attached :)

# January 16, 2008 9:42 AM

Klaus said:

From Copenhagen, Denmark: Happy birthday Sara Ford's mom :-)

# January 16, 2008 9:44 AM

ccatto said:

Hey Now Sara's Mom,

Happy BDay! Nice tip, just tried it & liked it. Good If you really want to focus on some code with long(wide) lines.

Thx 4 the info,

Catto

# January 16, 2008 10:04 AM

Pat said:

Happy Birthday Mom!

BTW...great job raising your kid. :)

# January 16, 2008 10:44 AM

Don Bailes said:

Dear Sara's Mom,

I would sing Happy Birthday to you, but it would not be a happy day while you were listening.  In any case, please have a wonderfully happy day full of many blessings - as your daughter is to all of her readers.

# January 16, 2008 11:16 AM

Stephen Patten said:

Happy Birthday from Orange County Ca!

Sara,

I tried this on my currently open IDE and it hid everything BUT the properties window, then, after a second attempt the properties window did close.

2 questions, How do I do this through a key stroke , and  

How do I restore the previously pinned windows?

Take care,

Stephen

# January 16, 2008 11:51 AM

Charles said:

From Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Thanks for the tips. Happy birthday to Sara Ford's mom.

# January 16, 2008 12:01 PM

Mark Gordon said:

Hi Sara,

Thanks for the weblog some of the posts have been helpful.

Did you know Visual Studio 2008 Webforms still does not perform native data binding to a data source which means I have to write hundreds of lines of code I probably shouldn't. Furthermore Microsoft no longer supports the best language it had for writing middle tier SQL Server data components for VS application yes I'm talking about Visual Foxpro. Without a true data centric language my produtivity has dropped drastically and database web application written solely in Visual Studio suffer from masses amounts of code bloat for data access.

I know it is not your fault this occured but adding data binding and having a "true" data centric language as part of Visual Studio would make our jobs alot easier. Sorry but linq doesn't fill this need.

Best Regards,

Mark

# January 16, 2008 1:15 PM

Björn said:

Herzlichen Glückwunsch Sara's Mom!

Yep, that's the German version of Happy Birthday just to be different :]

# January 16, 2008 2:40 PM

Susan said:

Happy Birthday Sara's MOM!  (aka my sister, Jane)

You have raised a wonderful, bright and delightful daughter who is and has been very giving!

May your days be filled with happy memories of you, Sara and Louie!

From Waveland,MS!

# January 16, 2008 4:25 PM

jane said:

Thank you all of Sara's blogger friends/associates for the birthday greetings.  I do read the comments from people even though I do not know what you are talking about.  Thanks again. I had a great day.

# January 16, 2008 4:29 PM

Trumpi's blog said:

Software Rhino ETL 2.0 Announcing Sandcastle Version 2.4.10115 Agile Patterns of Agile Adoption by Mike

# January 16, 2008 4:29 PM

Mike Wood said:

Happy B-day to Sara's Mom Jane!

It was great to meet Sara at CodeMash this year.  We really appreciate her tips.

# January 16, 2008 7:20 PM

Raj said:

Yikes! there is no way to return to original layout! :(

# January 17, 2008 12:54 PM

Peter Ritchie said:

Does resetting through Tools/Reset all settings re-show all the tool windows?  You could import the default settings (or previous exported settings) and select All Settings/General Settings/Window layouts in the Choose Settings to Import page.  I think that would do the trick, but I haven't tried it.

# January 17, 2008 1:47 PM

saraford said:

Hey Peter, yeah, people could do that.  They could use their auto-save file (look in tools options environment import/export settings for the file name) and import that (provided they got into the auto-hide all state PRIOR to shutting down the shell).

what i was thinking is there's a command Windows.ResetWindowLayout.  I believe this command will reset based on the last state your window layout was in when you did a Tools - Import / Export settings Reset.  (I need to do some testing to recall exactly, and there may have been changes in 2008).  My htoughts are you could do a "reset" to your preferred state, then whenever you want to do auto-hide all, you can then do a Window.ResetWindowLayout.  

Or even better, why doing i just send an email to the dev for window management =)

# January 17, 2008 2:05 PM

saraford said:

Okay, just chatted with my former dev.  The Windows.ResetWindowLayout command will reload the layout from the last import done that had a layout in it.     When we do an import we make a backup of the window layout so that it can be reloaded in this way.

So... what this means is before you want to experiment with auto-hide all or you just want to cache your favorite layout, do a Tools - Options - Export - Window Layouts.  Then do an Import.  Now when you do "auto-hide all", you can pop everything back out using Windows.ResetWindowLayout.

Yes, this is a workaround; I think there should be the reverse command to auto-hide all.  If others believe this to be so, please someone (Peter?) log a bug via Connect and let me know the ID # for others to vote on?

# January 17, 2008 2:35 PM

N said:

Happy Birthday! Thanks for the tips! They're really useful to all of us.

# January 17, 2008 6:21 PM

Enrico Gebauer said:

From Heilbronn, Germany: Happy birthday Sara's mom!

And Sara, thanks for all the great and useful tips!

# January 18, 2008 2:52 AM

deeps said:

thanks a lot for the tip........it really helped...thanks again

# February 20, 2008 12:48 AM

Секреты Visual Studio said:

Внимание! У этой команды нет обратного действия. То есть, вы не сможете восстановить все инструментальные

# June 3, 2009 3:04 AM
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