Visual Studio has one of the most sophisticated window management systems and while this nearly always acts in our favour, there are certain times when this is not the case. One such case is the animation that was added to tool windows to give Visual Studio that “cool” feel. In the following figure you can hopefully make out what I’m referring to. With the Solution Explorer docked to the right edge but unpinned, if you move your mouse over the top of it (even accidentally) the tool window will start to expand (as shown in image 2). The third image shows the tool window fully expanded.

Unfortunately visual effects such as the tool window animation come at a cost. In this case it is the frustration of having to wait until the tool window is fully expanded before you interact with it. Further more if you accidentally moved your mouse over the tab the window will still expand and will remain expanded until you set the focus elsewhere.

Luckily Visual Studio gives us an easy way to administer (read “disable”) this feature. From the Tools–>Options dialog, if you select the Environment–>General node you will see that there is an “Animate environment tools” checkbox and slider, as shown below. If you like the animation but just wish it would go a bit quicker you can just up the speed. However, if you are like me, you will just want to uncheck this box (after all anything that gets Visual Studio to work a bit quicker must be a good thing!).