Tabs Studio Blog (organizing Visual Studio document tabs)

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 was released this week. The only change I see (comparing to VS window tabs management in 2010 Beta 1) is the new Insert documents to the right of existing tabs option that allows opening tabs on the right:

I’ve updated Tabs Studio to accommodate some Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 internal changes and I will make it available in the next release:

As VS 2010 release date is set to March 22, 2010, I’ve extended evaluation period for Tabs Studio 2010 to April 22, 2010.

In Visual Studio 2010 Tabs Studio uses separate default style. As in .NET 4.0 OuterGlowBitmapEffect is no longer supported, I changed its usage to DropShadowEffect. DropShadowEffect is less visible, but at the moment I don’t know what else to use. Notice less red over close tab button and less white over selected tab content in Visual Studio 2010:

Default style for Visual Studio 2010 also sets transparent tabs background.

My efforts for Visual Studio 2010 support allow me to show the first screenshots:

Default style is currently the same. In custom style I set transparent background:

<Style TargetType="TabsStudio:Tabs" BasedOn="{StaticResource DefaultTabsStyle}">
            <Setter Property="Background" Value="Transparent"/>
</Style>

Let’s see what’s new in Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 for tabs management comparing to Visual Studio 2008:

Close tab button is now on the selected tab. Close button is also become visible when mouse is over a non selected tab:

Notice that not showing close tab button on non selected tabs doesn’t save horizontal space as place for close tab button is always reserved.

Context menu for document tab now has a Float command that allows document window to leave bounds of Visual Studio 2010 workspace:

The same floating as it was allowed for non document windows in Visual Studio 2008 (open link in new tab to enlarge):

Visual Studio 2010 doesn’t have Multiple documents Window layout option (aka MDI) any more:

Everything else is the same in VS10: there is only one row of tabs, new tabs are opened on the left, when tabs don’t fit the available space they are hidden, when hidden tab is selected it goes to the left corner, tab names for ASP.NET projects contain full path.

Update – Noah Coad has blogged about a registry setting to open tabs to the right in VS 2010:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0\General] 
"DocumentDockPreference"=dword:00000001

Finally, some words about Tabs Studio support for VS10. Underlying tabs and windows implementation in Visual Studio 2010 is now WPF based, no more Win32 windows. Tabs Studio’s injection subsystem need to be rewritten to accommodate for this changes.