Visual Studio has gone crazy

Question

Today I do a all references on a property. It opens a window with the references. It is all by itself. For example at the bottom are the error list , immediate window etc. The references window used to be part of this. No longer. I have done the update to the latest version of VS. What is happening is making VS's usefulness a historical thing as it seems broken.

As of the latest set of updates when I open files they no longer open where I want them (and where they have opened for the last 10 years).

The ultimate problem with the reference window problem is that when I double click a reference to open the file containing the reference it opens behind the reference window and that is just useless. Also the reference window cannot be moved set to a new location using the "where to go" control (my name).

Any ideas other than uninstalling / reinstalling?

Answer 1

Through just trying everything I could find I now find I have two tab groups. I never asked for tab groups and Google has no idea how to get rid of them.

The only suggestion is to right click a tab group and drag one tab group to the other. This cannot be done.

Answer 2

An uninstall / install does not solve the problem. At present VS has become detriment to development. To top it off I opened the project that I am working on and closed it once I found that the problem still existed. The context menu for VS (task bar) shows the project but clicking on it says the project does not exist. If I were to make a list of things that VS could do to make it seem useless I do not have the skill to come up with all that it has done to become useless.

Answer 3

It gets worse. Now I can open the project , I can build the project, I cannot start the project so as a development environment it is useless. Says it cannot launch the startup project.

Answer 4

Hi @Lloyd Sheen ,

Welcome to Microsoft Q&A!

Which version of Visual Studio are you using? What is your project type? Please try to create a new project and check if the situation occurs in specific project or not.

You can try to enter “devenv /ResetSettings” at Developer Command Prompt to restore your Visual Studio default settings
Meanwhile, delete the hidden .vs, bin and obj folders in the project folder.
Then, run your VS administrator and right click on your project to set as startup project to try again.

If it doesn't work, please share us some reproduce steps or screenshots so that we can investigate it further.

Sincerely,
Anna

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Answer 5

Ok here is what I know. I kept on right mouse clicking just about everything. One came up saying merge. I tried that and the tabs no longer showed up - good. This morning the tabs are back. I did nothing other than close VS and reopen it this morning. VS is behaving in a manner that is not conducive to productivity. There is no way that I can find easily to replicate what I did to end up with only one tab group and at the present it is at the left and takes up valuable screen space. VS has gone from a valuable development tool to something that seems to want to inhibit my efforts.