An idea for making efficient use of your Multiple monitors for Development…

MultiMonitorVS, originally uploaded by DavidChristiansen.

Andrew Rimmer mentioned on twitter that he wanted to make more efficient use of his multiple monitors and I thought I would share how I have managed to achieve an effective way to work with two or more monitors.

I have long been an advocate for multiple monitors. But frankly if you are sitting there with two or more monitors and looking at your lovely desktop picture from InterfaceLift on one of them then you may as well have saved your money.

The picture above is an example of how I have set out Visual Studio to make the most effective use my multiple monitor real estate. In this example we have a low (ish) res laptop monitor and a larger res external monitor.

For my three monitor setup in the office I have the main screen as the IDE code screen, flanked by two equal resolution monitors, one hosting all the panels and plugins for Visual Studio, and the other monitor being shared by SQL profiler, IM clients, email client and IE instances sharing the other monitor.

You will have to set up this layout for both normal coding, AND debugging – of course debugging you will want a different set of panels, for example locals, watches etc. in addition to solution explorer.

Hope you find this of interest