Visual Studio 2008 One Tab Limit ??

Question

I've had this problem for a few days now and it's actually killing me, I can't get any work done at all.

It's very simple - Visual Studio 2008 only allows me to have one tab (/active window) open at a time.

So I double click a file. file A, in my solution and it opens.
I try and open another, File B, and Visual Studio closes file A and then opens File B.

Hence, it will only allow me to have one tab open at any time.


I've checked multiple projects which work fine on other peoples machines and they're have no problems, but for all projects I have this issue, so I'm assuming its a VS setting/problem.

I've checked all the settings in VS, but can't see anything relating to limiting the number of tabs/active-windows.
I've restarted several times to make sure it wasn't a "lack of resources" issue, but with a 2ghz processor, 2GB of RAM and only VS2008 open, I still have this problem.

It's VS2008 - no updates or patches have been applied recently (or within the past few months), I've not even been into the VS2008 settings and changed anything.

It was all working fine for months up until yesterday.


Any idea's?

Answer 1

You could try resetting the environment settings, via the Tools > Import and Export Settings... > Reset all settings, and see if it works.

Answer 2

I've given this a go before but unfortunately it didn't work.

I've also even tried "toggling" some of the settings for VS2008 such as "use tabs" to "use windows", in the hope that it might somehow trigger a fix.
[e.g. fix a reg setting, reset a value....or something]

I think it may be a VS2008 repair/install job.

Answer 3

Hi Skyhiigh,

Could you please try doing the troubleshooting steps mentioned at:
What can be done if Visual Studio IDE encounters unexpected problems?

Please let me know if it helps.

Thanks.

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Answer 4

Hi,

Thankyou all for the responses, I'd tried everything mentioned at:
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/vssetup/thread/0376db8f-4761-4ae5-9af2-98c53216318a#VS_IDE_unexpected_problems

and more.

I ended up re-installing VS2008 and it all seems fine now, I can have multiple tabs again. I've not tested VS2005 yet though.




For future reference for any people Googling for this problem, since there are a few people with the issue but no 'real solution' some keywords to help others hopefully find this thread (I Googled for hours about this issue!):
visual studio one tab, visual studio single tab, vs 2008 single tab, visual studio tab stuck, visual studio single document, only one tab open, closes another tab, single tab, one window, visual studio single window


Cheers!

Answer 5

Hi Skyhiigh,

Thank you for your kindly sharing. Have a good day!

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Answer 6

Hi, I ran into this same issue just now and although completely unexpected, I do believe I know what triggered it (can no longer attempt to reproduce because it seems to effect all my projects now, sigh).

It came about because I wanted to generate code from Enterprise Architect and import it into an existing (and already open project).
First I specified the path in EA to point to my project, so the files got created inside MyProject\Class Model\*.cs.
Visual Studio didn't notice their creation within the project folder structure, so I then manually triggered "Add->New Folder" and renamed NewFolder1 to "Class Model" (which already exists at this point).
Since VS didn't notice that there were already files in this "new" folder, I of course took the obvious next step and did "Add->Existing Item..." on "Class Model", selecting all the files that were in the folder to force VS to realize their existence. Now that that was done I began opening them to edit them...

Oddly, every time I double clicked a file from "Class Model" (later to realize it had the same effect on ALL files) it replaced the first of the many already-open files with the appropriately double-clicked one, rather than opening a new tab.

In other words, the moment this bug kicks in, say I have 5 text files that are already open at the time, A-E.txt (in alphabetical order) and I want to open F and G within a folder I just "added", and close/reopen C.txt (should be fairly predictable with the above description):

A-E.txt are open
Double click F.txt and F.txt is opened, replacing A.txt. B-E.txt remain unchanged.
Double click G.txt and G.txt replaces F.txt, all else is unchanged.
Close C.txt and what we have at this point is G.txt, B.txt, D.txt and E.txt (this step is correct behaviour, of course)
Open C.txt and that replaces G.txt, thus we're left with C.txt, B.txt, D.txt, and E.txt.

I hope this helps you track down the bug and fix it, because I would definitely rather not lose the whole day (or longer) by having to reinstall VS and all the components and SDKs I use that plug into it.

Thanks,
Geoff

Edit: As a workaround, a file in a modified state (with the asterisk after the file name) seems to allow more tabs to be opened IF AND ONLY IF the first tab is in this state. However since newly opened tabs appear first, this means that the tabs need to be reordered (click & drag) every time you want to open a new tab by moving a modified-state file to the first tab position. This is a giant pain because I seem to waste a noticeable percentage of my time just by using this workaround, but at least it allows me to have multiple files open at once. Sigh.

I dearly hope Microsoft will fix this in VS2010 and retroactively for 2008, eclipse is becoming more and more attractive by the month (yes, I have suffered far too long already because of this issue).

Answer 7

I have recently hit this problem.  I tried reinstalling with no luck.  However, I did not delete the environment.  Is that what's required?

70andStillLearning

Answer 8

Bumping in the hopes someone from Microsoft will reply.