My open documents (tabs) continue to fade in VS2010 SP1

Question

In VS 2010, after I close my solution and then open it again the next day, all the documents that I opened will still be open. Just what I wanted.

After installing SP1, every time I open my solution, all my documents are closed, regardless of the state in which I left them.

Is this an expected behavior, an error, or is there a setting that I don't know about? How can I return my documents?

EDIT 29-Mar

Reinstalling VS2010 and SP1 did not solve this problem.

Answer 1

Make a backup of your settings and then do devenv.exe / resetsettings.

Answer 2

Build on top of SteveBob answer, just do Window -> Reset Window Layout

This should fix the tab issue. Of course, there is a side effect that you will have to redo / re-add all the windows (exit, solution explorer, properties, search, hours, immediate, etc.).

Answer 3

There seems to be no custom setting that controls whether open documents are remembered. By default, Visual Studio stores this data and then reopens the documents that were opened the last time the project / solution was closed. As indicated by some of the links cited by Stuart Dunkeld , a macro is required in Visual Studio to override this default behavior.

My problem is that my “Settings” have become bloated / damaged. Based on Luke's assumption, I exported my settings, then reset. This restored the default behavior of Remember Open Documents. Then, after much deliberation, I managed to import (almost) all my old settings and still not ruin the correct behavior of the document.

When importing my settings, I selected everything except the "Window Layouts" setting.

This restored my existing settings, while retaining the default behavior of Visual Studio, remembering which documents were open.

Then I re-exported my (fixed) settings so that I have a backup. This is when I noticed that my old, possibly corrupt exported settings file was 8.6 MB, and my new, correct exported settings file was only 0.2 MB.

After examining some of the differences between the two settings files, some of the information leads me to think that installing VS2010 SP1 had a conflict with the Document Well 2010 Plus feature in Power Tools Performance Extension , but I can’t test this positively.

Answer 4

Does it work with a new solution? If so, you can try to destroy the .suo file attached to your solution.

Answer 5

I keep a lot of open files. Every so often my VS2012 stops recovering open files. Opening them again does not help the recovery process.

I tried:

• All the above suggestions and all the suggestions that I could find elsewhere
• In particular: removing .suo, .filters, .sdf, .opensdf, etc.
• Plus / resetlayout
• Plus / resetsettings (ouch)

And no one works for me. Or at least not reliably.

But I just tried:

• Install productivity tools
• Enable options / performance. Power Tools / All Extensions / Satisfied Document.
• Restart Visual Studio
• (PPTools document saves and restores correctly!)
• Disable options / performance. Power Tools / All Extensions / Satisfied Document.
• Restart Visual Studio

And now the embedded document resumed saving and restoring properly properly! At least for now.

I assume that the embedded “document well” was obtained from one in PPTools, which may cause a side effect of turning PPTools on and off.

(I could just make good use of the PPTools document, but I cannot get colors in it to satisfy my satisfaction.)

Hope this helps someone.

Answer 6

Have you tried to delete the .suo file? Perhaps it has deteriorated.

Answer 7

Deleting the .suo file .suo for me. Thanks