Keep document open in Visual Studio 2013

visual-studio-2013

I noticed in Visual Studio 2013 that when you open a document via 'go to definition/f12' the document is only opened temporarily, as soon as you navigate away from the document it closes again.

Now you have to click on the 'keep open' icon in the tab. How do I 'keep open' all those files automatically like in previous versions of Visual Studio?

Best Answer

This is an optional feature which gives quick navigation to every file in Visual Studio. If you need to keep a file opened all time, you need to double click it.

Single click will open the file temporarily until you decide to open another file which opens in the same preview window. This feature can be disabled using:

TOOLS → Options → Environment → Tabs and Windows → Preview Tab → Single-click

IMO, this is a handy feature (explained here) just to avoid cluttering up the working space.

Visual Studio 2012 (Full)

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\11.0\General
DWORD: SuppressUppercaseConversion
Value: 1

In PowerShell, you can run this to set that registry key and the uppercase goes away.

Set-ItemProperty -Path HKCU:\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\11.0\General -Name SuppressUppercaseConversion -Type DWord -Value 1

Visual Studio Express 2012

The above registry key is not the one that will affect Visual Studio Express 2012 RC. A comment by FormatC showed up on Banks post about the key for Express. You can find that key mentioned in Mike Gleason's answer or run the following PowerShell command to set it.

Set-ItemProperty -Path HKCU:\Software\Microsoft\VSWinExpress\11.0\General -Name SuppressUppercaseConversion -Type DWord -Value 1

Visual Studio Express 2012 for Web

Set-ItemProperty -Path HKCU:\Software\Microsoft\VWDExpress\11.0\General -Name SuppressUppercaseConversion -Type DWord -Value 1

Visual Studio 2013

Replace 11.0 with 12.0 in the registry keys above.

Visual Studio 2015 Developer Preview

Replace 11.0 with 14.0 in the registry keys above.

How to switch the signed in user in Visual Studio 2013

There is a comment about this under this answer, but I think it's important to list it here. If you want to preserve your settings, export them first because they will be lost.

From MSDN forums - since I had to hunt around far too much to find the solution to this:

Close Visual Studio
Start the Developer Command prompt installed with Visual Studio as an administrator.
type 'devenv /resetuserdata' ('wdexpress /resetuserdata' for Express SKUs)
Start Visual Studio Normally.

Worked for me.