Tabs Studio Blog (organizing Visual Studio document tabs)

I’m often asked about the missing New horizontal/vertical tab group commands in the Tabs Studio context menu. Due to technical difficulties I can’t come up with a good overall solution for it, but now that Visual Studio 2010 introduces two new Window.NewHorizontalTabGroup and Window.NewVerticalTabGroup commands I can solve the most common case with an add-in:

The NewGroup add-in adds the New horizontal/vertical tab group commands to the Tabs Studio context menu for the selected tab/extension if commands are available. For example, the New horizontal tab group command is not available when vertical tab groups already created and both commands are not available when there is only one tab in a selected group. In Tabs Studio you can open a tab context menu without making the tab selected – in this case the two new commands are not shown as it is much harder to determine if they should be available in this case.

Download the NewGroup add-in for VS 2010.

.NET runtime traditionally has strict rules against running managed code from a network. In Visual Studio 2008 (CLR v2) to run Tabs Studio from a network share you had to add special “Code Access Security Policy”.

In Visual Studio 2010 (CLR v4) if you try to run Tabs Studio v2.0.5 from a network share you get error number 80131515:

To allow Tabs Studio to run you have to add the loadFromRemoteSources element (see the MSDN reference) to the “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe.config” (note, you need to run your editor with admin rights for correct devenv.exe.config modification):

<configuration>
   <runtime>
      <loadFromRemoteSources enabled="true"/>
   </runtime>
</configuration>

Plus you have to upgrade to Tabs Studio v2.0.6 that workarounds Assembly.Location throws ArgumentException.

Another potential problem is when you download Tabs Studio add-ins to your computer for Visual Studio 2010 from the Internet they may end up blocked by Windows (it is not a problem for Visual Studio 2008):

Loading such add-in for VS 2010 silently fails in Tabs Studio v2.0.5 and gives the following error in Tabs Studio v2.0.6:

To solve this problem you can either unblock Saver.dll in Windows Explorer or enable the loadFromRemoteSources switch in devenv.exe.config the same way as for running Tabs Studio from a network share.