The best tips come from customer questions that I can actually answer.

In England (or was it Mississippi, it’s been a long summer), a customer had asked me about what to do when at home he’s got a single monitor display, but at work has a multiple monitor display. If you’re using either the same settings files (or more likely the same laptop or VPN’ing in), you could have your window layouts go a little crazy.

First thing you can do is create two different settings files. Setup the window layouts how you want them in the single monitor mode, then go to Tools – Import / Export Settings, and Export just the Windows Layouts. Call the file SingleMontior.vssettings.

Now setup the window layouts exactly how you want them in the multi-monitor mode (of course, this requires you to actually be on the multi-monitor computer…) and call this file MultiMonitor.vssettings.

When at home, you can do a Tools – Import/Export Settings – Import to the SingleMonitor.vssettings or at work import the multi monitor settings file. But, there’s one more thin you can do.

There’s a command line switch /ResetSettings that I totally forgot about. (Sorry).

If you do just a devenv /resetsettings, then VS will reset to the last file you last reset to (or picked at first launch), despite the “VS is configuring for first time use.” Specifying a file name is much more interesting. Here you could do a devenv /resetsettings SingleMonitor.vssettings for example.

So at home, create a new Desktop shortcut, called VS Single Monitor with the Target as “<drive:>\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe" /resetsettings SingleMonitor.vssettings. And at work create the MultiMonitor version.

Now you just have to launch the right shortcut, and you’re good to go.

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