Chapter 3Options and Customizations
- Customizing the Visual Studio 2013 start page
- Tweaking options
- Controlling window layout
Now that you’re familiar with the general layout of Visual Studio 2013, it’s time to learn how you can customize the IDE to suit your working style. In this chapter you learn how to manipulate tool windows, optimize the code window for maximum viewing space, and change fonts and colors to reduce developer fatigue.
As Visual Studio has grown, so too has the number of settings that you can adjust to optimize your development experience. Unfortunately, unless you’ve periodically spent time sifting through the Options dialog (Tools 
Options), it’s likely that you’ve overlooked one or two settings that might be important. Through the course of this chapter, you see a number of settings that might be worth further investigation.
The ability to customize your settings is not new to Visual Studio 2013. Nor is the ability to import and export settings. However, Microsoft’s push to the cloud has even had an impact on Visual Studio. With this version, you can automatically synchronize your settings between the cloud and any instance of Visual Studio that you log in to.
A number of Visual Studio add-ins add their own nodes to the Options dialog because this provides a one-stop shop for configuring settings within Visual Studio. Note also ...
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