Before I had my nice new laptop I had a normal desktop for work. It had two monitors so when I worked, I spread the windows of Visual Studio to cover both screens and give me maximum working space. If I worked from home I would connect to my work desktop using Remote Desktop and work like that. The problem was that this only gave me one monitor so I had to readjust the window layout for single-monitor usage. If I then would go to the office the next day, Visual Studio would still be in single-monitor window layout from the day before and I would have to drag all the windows around to get my dual-monitor layout back.
Now I have a nice laptop, so whether I work from home or in the office, I use the same machine. But I still have two monitors at work and only one at home. So even though I drag my PC with me everywhere, I still have the window layout problem.
Two or so years ago I discovered the VSWindowManager. This is a plug-in for Visual Studio that allowed you to save up to three profiles of different window layouts. You could then add three buttons to your toolbar to access those profiles. It did exactly what I wanted, but I still had two minor issues with it. First I couldn't rename the buttons, so I had to remember which button mapped to which layout. This wasn't that big of a problem. Secondly, and this was much more annoying, if you clicked the button of the profile you had currently loaded, it would save the window layout into to profile. So if I would come at work after having worked from home and I accidentally clicked the wrong button while trying to restore my dual-monitor layout, I would overwrite that layout with the then current single-monitor layout and I would have layout all the windows by had again.
If you look at the VSWindowManager project, it was last updated in September 2006. Now I do most of my work in Visual Studio 2008 and the plug-in doesn't work on this newer version. Sure, someone downloaded the source and got it to work for VS2008, but it didn't feel good to me if the original author had abandoned the project. So it was back to doing stuff by hand.
Earlier tonight I got fed up with it and decided to find a solution (again). I hoped that maybe someone else had written a similar plug-in. Instead, I found something way better. After googling a little, I came upon this MSDN article titled: Visual Studio 2005 IDE Tips and Tricks. It has a section specially dedicated to saving window layout and it provided a very simple solution to my problem. It uses the possibility to export user settings, together with a small macro to achieve exactly what I need.
Basically it works like this. You start by laying out the windows the way you like it. Then you export your IDE settings using the "Import and Export settings wizard", but in this wizard you can specify exactly what settings you want to export. So you choose only to export your window layout. You save the settings file in a known and accessible location (like your profile or documents folder) and name it so you know what settings these are. Then you create a new macro using the built-in macro editor. This macro will simply import the settings file. And since you only exported your window layout, this is the only setting that will be changed. So I can make a macro for my single-monitor setup and another macro for my dual-monitor setup. I can then add these macros to my toolbar and give them any icon and name I want.
Multi-/single-monitor problem solved!
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