I had a funny half-hour this afternoon, when one of my colleagues took a new call from a customer whom had some troubles with the Properties window in his Visual Studio 2005… The customer reported a weird behavior within the Visual Studio IDE in particular with the Properties window, which was not available despite his attempts to display it both pressing the F4 keyboard shortcut and from the View > Properties Window menu command. Moreover this had the effect to remove the focus from the Visual Studio IDE but apparently nothing else was getting it, and there was a weird Format menu appearing and disappearing… ?
It was kind of fun to see Stefano on the phone with the customer, listening to his description and his face getting more and more puzzled… ? Until after some quick research in our internal docs he found a reference to a similar problem, and after a quick test he triumphally called the customer back with the solution after just 20 minutes! ?
As I guess you know the Properties window (like other windows in Visual Studio) can be detached from the IDE and left float around the screen; the point here was that the customer somehow moved the window outside the desktop and it was not visible anymore… ? How to get it back?
-
- Press F4 (or the corresponding keyboard shortcut) to move the focus to the Visual Studio window you’re hunting
- Press ALT+- (ALT and minus key) to open the small window menu
- Press M
- Press ENTER
- Now the window will be “attached” to the mouse pointer to move it around, but most important we can see it now! ? Dock it to the IDE if you wish
Carlo
Quote of the Day:
I like pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.
–Winston Churchill