Visual Studio Hacks

Take Control of Your Workspace #16

Chapter 3, Navigating Visual Studio

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HACK

Work with Tabs

Tabs are all over Visual Studio. One of the most common places you find

tabs is when you dock multiple windows in the same spot. Visual Studio will

create a tab list of all the different windows you have docked. Two short-

cuts can be used to quickly toggle between tabs. The first is Window.Next-

Tab (Ctrl-PageDown) and the second is Window.PreviousTab (Ctrl-

PageUp). You can use these shortcuts any time the focus is set on a window

that has tabs (for example, on the Solution Explorer window, you can use

these shortcuts to toggle between the Solution Explorer, class view, etc.).

When in the document view, these commands do not change the tabs that

are across the top of the document window, but rather the tabs that some-

times appear at the bottom of the document window. For example, when

working with a file type that includes a designer, such as an ASP.NET file,

there are two tabs at the bottom of the window (one for the design view and

one for the HTML view). Use the keystrokes described in the previous sec-

tion to move between the tabs across the top of the window—these are con-

sidered document windows.

Work with Panes

A pane is defined as any of the windows you can move and dock. The solu-

tion explorer, class view, and task list are all panes. Two commands can be

used to quickly move between all the