Rob Smyth

Monday, 12 July 2010

Using Visual Studio 2010 over RDP With Dual Screens

I often work from home and want to use my work box with dual screens but my home monitors have different resolutions. Normally, with a VPN/RDP connection, the windows RDP software cannot handle dual screens nicely and not at all when they have different resolutions. I like SplitView, it allows me to do this.

At home I have laptop and an external monitor. The laptop has a 1680 pixels across and the monitor has 1920 across. Needless to say I want to use both with Visual Studio's main editor on the larger monitor and the debug, output, unit tests windows on the smaller laptop monitor. With SplitView I can connect to my work computer and use both. The nice thing is that I can maximise an application within a monitor without it filling both monitors.

It is a little tricky (you do need to read the doco) to setup as it does layer over RDP. With a little fiddling about with the screen sizes it works nicely.

But the screens are not exactly the same and when I return to the office after working from home I find that the screen layouts have changed. A bit annoying. Move the VS2010 properties window here, output window here, etc. So I saves my "in office" and "rdp" layouts using VS's "Import and Export Settings". First get the layout you want and the export it by selecting "General Settings | Windows Layout" only. Then from home, or in the morning, you can quickly restore world order to your windows. Nice.

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