Mike-Ward.Net

Dual monitor use in Visual Studio 2005

If you have dual monitors and would like to make some use of the expanded realestate, check this out. You can likely do something like this in the MDI mode of VS2005 but I like that tab interface better and this trick gives me the best of both.

1. Make your main Visual Studio application window a sizable window (not minimized or maximized).
2. Resize it to stretch it as wide as you’d prefer across both monitors (the 2nd image below completely spans the width and height of both my monitors)
3. Right click on an open source code window’s tab and choose New Vertical Tab Group. The result is two fully independent code panes, with independent scrolling, browsing, etc. You can also create numerous horizontal tab groups, which I didn’t explore yet.
4. Use your mouse to drag/place the vertical splitter where you prefer (in the 2nd image below, my splitter sits right at the border between my two monitors, so that the left side files the entire left monitor).
5. You can drag and drop source code window tabs to put them in one group or another.
6. You can keep splitting to have numerous independent code panes with their own tab groups. Each tab group has its own window list.