Why does Visual Studio 2010 change the position of my design window after returning to development mode from build mode?

Question

I had a problem with Visual Studio 2010, which completely turns me on. A common problem is that Visual Studio 2010 does not seem to remember my window positions. (Visual Studio 2010, v.10.0.40219.1 SP1Rel on Windows XP SP3.)

Now I know that Visual Studio 2010 has different window layouts for build mode and design. I came to accept this, because there are some things in life that I cannot change. If I could disable this feature, I would be too happy, but I do not think it is possible.

The biggest problem at this stage is that Visual Studio 2010 does not remember the position of the window in development mode after switching to build mode and returning to development mode.

Here are some screenshots to illustrate this problem:

Imagine what I am coding. OK, time to build.

OK, window layouts have changed. It is annoying, but anything. Return to development mode.

This looks fine, but WAIT - why don't the windows return to their previous position?

I use the small size of the Visual Studio window here, but as the red box shows, there is a difference. Why is this happening and what can I do to fix this problem? This drives the OCD in me completely nuts. This is not like the big changes in these screenshots, but when I have a VS instance zoomed in on my two monitors (configured to display as one continuous desktop instead of two desktops), this is a very noticeable and annoying change.

Possible problems that I thought caused this problem:

• I save my working copy in the Dropbox folder. I work from this Dropbox folder. However, I tried the same problem with Dropbox turned off and reproduced the above problem.
• Corrupted settings file. I tried this with the new MVC application, saved it outside of Dropbox, and the same thing happened.
• The problem with Windows XP. I know that I need to update, but, unfortunately, this is not always an option. If Windows 7 does not have this problem, I will gladly update it.
• @Shtong replied below that I should use a dual-monitor setup with different configurations on the desktop and install tools to improve Visual Studio performance . Although this will technically fix the problem (now I have two sets of mixed tabs and the sizes do not change) - instead, the docking positions are forgotten. This means that if I pin Explorer Solution to the right in development mode, and then build, and then return to development mode, my docked window is no longer docked.

I also had the same issue in Visual Studio 2008.

Answer 1

Have you tried installing Visual Studio Productivity Tools , which allow you to split your editors into different windows, make two windows and bind them to one monitor (instead of stretching on two monitors)? Thus, each window should fit into its monitor, like any other window, and your problem should disappear.