Professional Visual Studio® 2008

3.1. Window Layout

If you are unfamiliar with Visual Studio, the behavior of the numerous tool windows may strike you as erratic, because they seem to appear in random locations and then come and go when you move from writing code (design time) to running code (runtime) and back again. Visual Studio 2008 will remember the locations of tool windows in each of these modes separately. This way you can optimize the way you write and debug code.

As you open different items from the Solution Explorer, you'll see that the number of Toolbars across the top of the screen varies depending on the type of file being opened. Each Toolbar has a built-in association to specific file extensions so that Visual Studio knows to display the Toolbar when a file with one of those extensions is opened. If you close a Toolbar when a file is open that has a matching file extension, Visual Studio will remember this when future files with the same extension are opened.

You can reset the association between Toolbars and the file extensions via the Customize dialog (Tools Customize). Select the appropriate Toolbar and click the "Reset" button.

3.1.1. Viewing Windows and Toolbars

Once a tool window or Toolbar has been closed it can be difficult to locate it again. Luckily most of the most frequently used tool windows are accessible via the View menu. Other tool windows, mainly related to debugging, are located ...