When a breakpoint is hit in Visual Studio, it steals the focus from whatever other application the programmer is viewing/typing into at that moment. This can be very irritating since VS grabs any keyboard input the programmer was typing into the other application at that moment and takes that input as its own.
What are the tricks you folks use to prevent this focus steal?
(I face this on Visual C++ 2008 and 2010. I am guessing it is a problem for Visual Studio in general and for all recent versions.)
This is finally fixed in VS2019. Go to Tools->Options->Debugging->General, down at the bottom is "Bring Visual Studio to the foreground when breaking in the debugger."
Just de-select it and you will no longer be interrupted while multitasking.
This is a registry setting. See ForegroundLockTimeout at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc957208.aspx. Zero allows applications to steal focus. TweakUI sets this value to 200000 when "Prevent applications from stealing focus" is checked.
For more control, download the Tweak UI utility of Powertoys for Windows XP. In the "General" tab, select "Focus" and check "Prevent applications from stealing focus".
Google search for ForegroundLockTimeout at http://www.google.com/search?q=ForegroundLockTimeout
Bing search for Prevent applications from stealing focus at http://www.bing.com/search?q=Prevent+applications+from+stealing+focus
Applications Stealing Focus on Windows XP at http://mycvs.org/archives/2004/11/16/applications-stealing-focus-on-windows-xp for screen capture of TweakUI.
Please Don't Steal My Focus, Coding Horror, Jeff Atwood at http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/12/please-dont-steal-my-focus.html
The strange thing is, there are
provisions built into the operating
system to protect us from badly
written, focus stealing applications.
The ForegroundLockTimeout registry
setting is expressly designed to
prevent applications from stealing
focus from the user. The OS silently
converts that inappropriate focus
stealing behavior into friendlier,
less invasive taskbar button flashing,
which is the subject of the
ForegroundFlashCount registry setting.
How To Prevent Programs from Stealing Focus in Windows XP at http://www.howtodothings.com/computers-internet/how-to-prevent-programs-from-stealing-focus-in-windows-xp
Right click the breakpoint and select When hit ... this will allow you to run a function when the breakpoint is hit. You can use this to print status messages to the output window. You application will keep focus.
By accident I discovered a workaround, which I've been using for a few years now and while I haven't tested it in 2008 and 2010, it certainly works in 2013, '15 & '17 and at least Windows 7 & 10.
It relies on the fact that Visual Studio will not steal focus if another Visual Studio instance is paused in execution. Obviously the only thing as special as VS is another VS. :-/
Open a second instance of VS with a simple project. Pause the execution of the project anyway you like (e.g. put a breakpoint on the first line of execution and debug), you can then simply minimise that VS and none of the VS instances you're actually using will steal focus.
This is is obviously a heavy weight solution, but if you have ample RAM (the CPU usage of the idle VS doesn't even register for me), it works well. I haven't tried it with inter-version instances (e.g. pausing in '13 to make '17 behave), but if that works you'll probably want to opt to use the older version instance as your "dummy" VS to cut down on resource use.
One workaround is to use OutputDebugString() function to output current state into the debugger output window. You just place Visual Studio in background, position the debugged program window so that the "Output" window is visible - and no focus transition ever happens.
You will perhaps want to use macros for conditional compilation so that tracing code is not included into the release builds.
Related
Say I'm debugging an application. It's paused in the debugger. I hit the Run button. The application being debugged gets focused (and Visual Studio loses focus).
Is there a way to prevent this behaviour?
(And, as a bit of an aside: Why does this happen? Is it Visual Studio deliberately giving that window focus? Or is it a side-effect of the way debugging works on Windows? Or something else?)
For context, see this answer. Although I imagine that, if possible, it would be useful to prevent the focus change in other debugging scenarios as well.
It because the alternative is so much worse, focusing events are a Big Deal in gui programming. A debugger must have the absolute minimum impact on the program being debugged to avoid artifacts so restoring everything the way it was before resuming execution is important. Including the focus.
It just a quick Alt+Tab to get back to the debugger.
I'm wondering whether other users of VS2010 are experiencing the same problems as me.
I find I have to restart VS several times a day after the XAML editor becomes unresponsive to mouse clicks. I've tried submitting a Connect issue but got nowhere with that.
My environment is:
Quad core machine runing Vista 64 with 8GB RAM.
VS2010 SP1 - had the same problems with VS2010.
ReSharper 5.1.3
Editing Silverlight XAML files - I have the split screen with preview at the top and the XAML at the bottom. After some time of working, if I click in the XAML the carret doesn't move to the clicked position. Other parts of VS are unresponsive to mouse clicks as well. Basically I have to shut down VS and restart.
Of course, this is difficult to reproduce - it generally only happens after several hours of running.
Anybody got any ideas on how to fix this, or better bring it to Microsoft's attention?
Update:
Here's the link the the Microsoft Connect item I entered.
http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/618594/xaml-designer-stops-responding-to-mouse
This is a very common problem, you should check out some other references, but a few thigns you can do are;
Replace the XAML editor with something else (Blend maybe)
Right click on a XAML file, goto "Open With" then select an alternative editor and also select the set as default option.
Open the XAML editor in Full screen source mode by default. This will bypass a lot of the design time compilation's
Close other windows, in visual studio when your editing the XAML, perticularly the properties display. I've found that this window frequently queries the design time model of your code to display properties and such (if you dont want them triggering all the time, close the window and that thread will be idle).
Good Luck!
I've had similar issues where the mouse stops responding on certain windows when resharper is running. The only solutions I've found so far are:
Hit the ALT key (discovered the mouse becomes active after this, but you have to keep hitting it every time you switch windows)
Restart visual studio
Disable resharper
Update:
This is essentially a Vista 64 problem but ReSharper exacerbates the problem through large memory use. Upgrading to Windows 7 64 bit solves the problem.
Most of the time I work Visual Studio with two monitors.
I setup my Visual Studio to sit nicely across both monitors with code on the one side and property windows etc. on the other.
However, occasionally I need to remove into my work station from home where I only have one monitor.
What ends up happening is I have to re-setup my entire workspace to be used on one monitor, and when I get back to my work station I have to undo this again to get to my optimal 2 monitor environment.
Is there a way to save some set layouts in Visual Studio so I could quickly switch back and forward?
Example: One Monitor Layout versus Two Monito Layout?
stumbled upon this which really helped:
link text
The actual solution seems to throw an error for me, but one of the comments suggests you use your "full screen" view to do it.
So I setup my screen the way I like it.
Then I press "shift+alt+enter" which turns on full screen mode.
I then setup my environment for "One Screen mode: (ironic, I know)
Visual Studio now remembers my full screen setup.
So now when I remote in I can just press "shift+alt+enter" and I'm in one screen mode.
Hopefully this post will help someone else, otherwise I would be interested to hear other solutions.
I am using Visual Studio 2010 with Windows 7
By default, in Visual Studio and in SQL Server Management Studio, Ctrl+Tab opens a navigation popup which lists all the open windows. The idea is that you can press Tab multiple times while keeping Ctrl pressed; as soon as you release Ctrl, the navigation popup disappears and the selected document is activated.
Unfortunately, as soon as you ever run Microsoft Narrator (text-to-speech reader), this behaviour changes. The popup no longer disappears when you release Ctrl; it waits until you press Enter to select a document. While I can appreciate this behaviour may be reasonable for blind people who are actually reliant on Narrator, I find it rather irritating that the behaviour has changed permanently and that the old behaviour doesn't return even if I stop using Narrator completely.
Is there any way to restore the old behaviour so that it doesn't wait for an extra Enter keypress anymore?
Be patient and it magically starts reverting to normal after not using Narrator or Speech Recognition for a month or so.
I know this is old, but still an issue with SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) 2008 when Speech recognition is running on Windows 7 (32bit Ultimate).
Worse yet, there is no fix per se. As a workaraound, I exit Speech Recognition, and then ctrl-tab behaves as expected.
I saw a post for changing Narrator settings, but none of the settings in Narrator (text to speech) have any effect on the issue.
I use Visual Studio 2008. I haven't seen this behavior before and, as far as I know, I didn't change anything in the options.
When I press Start debugging all the possibly windows (watch 1 - 4), data sources, properties, registers (to be honest I have not even ever seen these windows before) appear in front of the code window and stay there after I stop the debugger.
Anyone has an idea what could be causing this ? (I am using CodeRush and Refactor for quite a while now)
When I close and restart visual studio all the windows are where they should be.
PS: Previously I have seen normal switching from normal to debug mode and back with some repositioning changes. That is the way it used to work. Now it is not. It has suddenly gone mad and when going to the debug mode it sometimes shows all possible IDE windows and sometimes not. When it does it no longer returns to the previous state. I cannot find this in the options anywhere.
Visual Studio remembers 2 sets of window layouts, normal mode and debugging mode. My solution is to arrange my normal windows exactly like I want them, then start debugging an application and once again arrange all of the windows the way I want, usually making it as similar to my normal layout as possible, then stopping the debugger and doing a File Exit so that VS saves my settings.
After doing that, it recalls my 2 different layouts each time.
I'm experiencing the same thing - whenever the debugger is running, switching focus back to the IDE immediately caused the debug panel to expand.
I ended up just pinning the debug panel so that it always appears when debugging, and just changing its height as needed.
To add to palehorse, another tip is Full Screen mode.