Dual Screen Setup for Visual Studio 2008

my dual screen setup

After getting totally unable to live without multiple monitors due to multiple reasons [coolness, openess, manageability, productivity] and requirements, last month I ordered a pair of 19″ Widescreen Philips 190SW LCD for my office workstation (see image). Since most of my time is spent inside Visual Studio, i found it compelling to Google dual screen setups for visual studio as a developer and designer. Though i did not get much from it, I landed on Sara ford’s post about multi-monitor support in visual studio. Though the post itself does not provide as much information, the comments are quite helpful and show how everyone has his/her own taste of setting up the new enviornment.

FIrst of, we need a good software to deal with multiple monitors. Windows XP per se does not provide much functionality for it. I downloaded the trial version of UltraMon. UltraMon basically lets you use two seperate taskbars, display different wallpaper on each monitor and so on. It even lets you maintain seperate list of opened windows in each taskbar, something the regular windows taskbar does not allow.

Next I experimented with some setups for visual studio with multiple monitors. Some of them were a reflection of changes suggested in the comments of sara ford’s post. Here is the setup snaps for my workstation at office. Not the best, it is quite optimal for now. For advanced setups it would obviously needs tweaking. For example you would like to see threads panel in debug view, but since i dont need it I didnt keep it.

The Code View:

Code View

As you can see, i keep a solution explorer, toolbox (as a clipboard for snippets) and properties / class view on the secondary monitor. I use Class View to quickly search anything (this is a handy and under-rated tool – quite useful when you have 20+ projects in a solution)

The Debug View:

Debug View

The debug view, again, is fairly simple and i keep the most used windows on  the secondary monitor.

The Design View:

design view

The design view is arguable. I think the toolbox can even go on the left of primary monitor, but then again depends on the type of form you are designing.

So, what are your multi-monitor setups for Visual Studio Development Enviornmnet. What about general working enviornment?

Filed under: general, development enviornment, dual screen, multi-monitor setup, visual studio 2008, visual studio multi monitor