Visual Studio in Full-Screen Mode
Even after you maximize Visual Studio's window you don't yet have the maximum space for working with code and the Visual Studio's visual designers. To get the maximum bit of screen real estate available, you can put your Visual Studio edit window in full-screen mode by selecting View | Full screen (or just pressing Shift+Alt+Enter). Full screen mode gets rid of the toolbars and all of your tool windows (Solution Explorer, the Toolbox, etc.); you get to keep the menu bar and the tabs for your open files (though the tabs' appearance is altered to take up less room).
When you need to get out of full-screen mode, all you have to do is click the Full Screen choice that gets added to the menu bar when you enter full screen mode.
You can still display any of the tool windows you want by selecting them from the View menu. You might also want to try memorizing the hot keys that bring up those windows, but those hot key aren't particularly obvious. It helps that the hot keys for the tool windows all begin with Control+Alt. But, unfortunately, Control+Alt+S doesn't bring up Solution Explorer as you might expect. Instead, Control+Alt+S brings up Server Explorer. To get to the Solution Explorer window, you need to use Control+Alt+L (and, no, I have no idea why). Getting to the toolbox is the equally unobvious Control+Alt+X. If there's a shortcut for Test Explorer, I haven't found it yet.
It's not my fault.
But if you're going to bang in a lot of code, it's hard to beat having all that screen real estate. If the hotkeys for the tool windows were more obvious, I'd like it even better.
Posted by Peter Vogel on 03/05/2015