For a long time now I have been working with only one monitor. For a developer it poses some difficulties like lots of overlapping windows. Without even really knowing how it is really like I have always been an advocate of a dual monitor setup. Now when I have a laptop and an external LCD I can only say that I was right, but at the same time wrong!
Two monitors give you much more space on which you can put your windows. For instance you can put a help window on one monitor and the code on the other. If you work with ASP.NET you can have a browser running on one of the monitors while you edit the code on the other and take advantage of Edit and Reload feature. Possibilities are almost countless. Almost...
The one thing that I was wrong about is the fact that my primary development tool: Visual Studio 2005 does not support dual monitor setup! Can you imagine? The only support available is that you can move SOME of the windows on to the second monitor. The windows you can move include Solution Explorer, Watch, Immediate and all the other dockable windows. Good as it is, I think it is only a side effect of those windows being draggable. The problem is that Visual Studio was never intended to be used on more than one monitor and that is why you cannot move the most important windows to the second monitor. What are the most important windows? For me it is the code window and the design window (ASP.NET).
At first I thought that I might be missing something. Some switch in the preferences. Unfortunately it is simply impossible according to the following sources:
http://blogs.msdn.com/saraford/archive/2005/07/20/441126.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/saraford/archive/2004/05/18/134295.aspx
That's a pity. I cannot wait for the next version of Visual Studio in hope that they will add the support for more than one monitor.