Visual Studio 2015 introduced a nice feature, which let us customize the overall IDE experience and reuse it further. This becomes very handy if you develop on multiple devices or multiple monitors, and generally most of the developer does that. We develop applications either in Laptop, Tablet and as well as large screen monitors. Depends on the screen size and space availability, generally we move around the common windows, such as – Toolbox, Solution explorer, Server Explorer etc. Visual Studio 2015 now allows us to create our own windows layouts and use it one other devices, screens without reorganizing it again. It is just, create once, and use it anytime on your preferred devices.
Here is how, you can leverage this feature.
Creating the Layouts :
First organize your IDE Windows / Tools Windows depends on your device / monitor you are working on. For an example, my main development screen is my connected with a large secondary monitor, and I can have most of the common tool box’s open, and below image shows how typically it looks like.
Now to create a layout, from the main menu, navigate and select Windows –> Save Window Layout. Provide the name of the layout and click on “Ok”.
Similarly, create multiple view’s for different devices, monitors and save the accordingly.
Applying the Layouts:
Applying the layouts is also straight forward and can be done from “Window –> Apply Window Layout” . You can also use the corresponding shortcut to have the ready quickly.
Here is the quick example of multiple layout of development environments.
Mange Your Layouts :
You can easily mange the layouts by either editing, deleting or rename them from the menu Windows –> Manage Window Layouts .
You can also change the order of to enable the default layouts by moving them up / down.
Reset Layouts :
You can reset all of your layouts, by selecting “Reset Window Layout” from the Window menu. This will restore the default windows layout for the environment.
That’s all. This is really great feature for developers who develops in multiple environments and can be easily switch the layouts, rather customizing the every time.
