I can think of two different ways of doing this. The first uses only the parameters built into Visual Studio 2010, but it is more limited and may not work in 100% of cases. Another requires that you install the extension, but much more powerful, reliable, and even add some other useful features.
You can configure Visual Studio to always open new tabs to the right of existing tabs , as a web browser would do. (Personally, I prefer this option.) To do this, open the Options dialog box (Tools → Options), expand the Environment category, click Documents, and select the Insert Documents box to the right of existing tabs ( see screenshot ).
The key to doing this work for you is to ensure that you always open the source code explorer before opening any other code windows, and then never close it. Thus, it will always be in the far left corner, and all open code windows will be inserted to the right of it.
As I mentioned above, the advantage of this approach is that it uses the configuration built into Visual Studio and does not require any additional installation. All you have to do is flip the switch. The disadvantage is that it is not 100% reliable - if you close the source code explorer and reopen it, you will have to remember to drag it back to the leftmost position or it will not be there when you go looking for it.
You can install the Microsoft Tools Productivity Power Tools extension ( from the Visual Studio gallery ), which adds the ability to bind tabs (among many other neat features) to the VS IDE. There great functionality added specifically to the document tab is good here , but the most interesting feature is the attached tabs . You can even show attached tabs in a separate line!
This is as close as possible to ideal solutions, but it has a drawback that requires the installation of something additional. In some environments and for some people, this can be a killer of deals. Too many extensions can also slow down, and later versions of Visual Studio often seem rather slow. (Although, for what it's worth, I use the PPT extension on about half of my VS installations, and I did not notice that this caused serious problems.)