Scott Guthrie has a very informative series about Visual Studio 2010 over on his web site. Today’s article is about enhanced multi-monitor support in VS 2010. I have only had a chance to use VS 2010 in a virtual machine, and have not had a chance to take the multi-monitor stuff mentioned in his article for a test drive. It does look very cool.
Something I am particularly interested in is support for varying numbers of monitors. At work I have a dual 19″ monitor display rig. At home I remote into my desktop from my single-monitor 17″ laptop. I occasionally have trouble with windows displaying correctly when I remote in. particularly using Visual Studio 2008 with tool boxes that are on the second monitor. In VS 2010, window settings are kept in the local user file for the project, so if nothing else one should be able to move off-screen windows on-screen with a little text editing. I am interested to see what kind of built-in support VS 2010 will have to detect that the second monitor is not present in this type of situation. If it doesn’t auto-detect, it might now be easy to build a tool to edit the user file, or swap out user files.
FYI, VMWare Workstation has multimonitor support. I’ve been told but haven’t verified that the newest version of VirtualBox does too.
For the dual vs single issue, you can take advantage of the normal mode vs full screen mode (shift+alt+enter). Pick one that will be only a single monitor, and one that will be dual. Be religious about keeping your chosen single monitor windows on the single monitor.
One of the things I miss about the Delphi IDE is the ability to define many different layouts, and apply them at will. This is something I really wish VS had.
Right. I have a MVS image, and have neglected to build a VMWare version or convert it.