Tabs Studio Blog (organizing Visual Studio document tabs)

I’ve added basic support for Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview – all tabs functionality that was available in VS 2010 is now available in VS 11.

The new preview tab is displayed as a normal tab, but you can see the blue under line when it is selected. To manually promote this tab you can use the Window menu and the keyboard shortcut (btw this screenshot was made on Windows 8):

Promote preview tab command in Visual Studio menu

I don’t know how useful the preview tab will be. It can be turned off in Visual Studio options. On the other hand, floating tab groups are definitely useful and I will try my best to support them in a next release.

I noticed one new problem in VS 11 – tabs in a separate window can get light grey background inheriting style from a Visual Studio control up in the tree. To work around this, use the following custom style (it is the same example style that disables blue inactive tab background on mouse over):

<Style TargetType="TabsStudio:Tab" BasedOn="{StaticResource DefaultTabStyle}">
  <Setter Property="Template">
    <Setter.Value>

      <ControlTemplate TargetType="{x:Type TabsStudio:Tab}">
        <Border Background="{TemplateBinding Background}" Padding="5,1,5,1"
                      BorderThickness="1,1,1,0" BorderBrush="Gray">
        <ContentPresenter Name="Content" ContentSource="Header"
              HorizontalAlignment="{Binding Path=HorizontalContentAlignment,
                RelativeSource={RelativeSource AncestorType={x:Type ItemsControl}}}"/>
        </Border>
      </ControlTemplate>
    </Setter.Value>

  </Setter>
</Style>

Download link: Tabs Studio v2.5.0.

Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview was released this week:

Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview

Tabs can be pinned now and remain always visible – in the same row with normal tabs, in a separate row above normal tabs and in several rows above normal tabs:

Pinned tabs in a separate row above normal tabs

Documents opened indirectly, e.g. when you hit a breakpoint in a new file, are displayed in a special preview tab. When you hit a next breakpoint in another new file, the preview tab displays the new file and “forgets” about the previous one. Thus reducing the number of open documents:

The blue preview tab during debugging

Floating documents can be grouped in a separate window and have tab groups within this separate window:

Floating document in a separate window with two vertical tab groups

Several self-explanatory options are available to customize tabs and windows behavior:

Tabs and windows options

I’ve managed to run Tabs Studio in the new IDE, but need more time to make a proper release:

Tabs Studio tabs in Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview

If you often work on different parts of an application with different groups of document tabs opened, you may find my new Favorite Documents extension helpful:

Favorites menu in Visual Studio 2010

Favorite Documents lets you create links to frequently used code files and then quickly open them as a group or individually from the Favorites menu in Visual Studio 2010.

Home page: Favorite Documents.
Direct download link: Favorite Documents v1.0.