Visual Studio 2010 QuickWatch window not visible

Question

When I highlight a variable in VS2010 and right click to choose QuickWatch, the QuickWatch window does not appear. VS behaves as though the modal window is open and keeps me from doing anything until I hit "Cancel".

A coworker suggested that I go to the Window menu and choose Reset Windows Layout but that didn't help either.

BTW, I am running on Windows XP.

Answer 1

Try opening the Quickwatch window (Shift+F9 by default), then press Alt, then press twice on the Down key. finally press the Enter button.

This should activate the move action for the window. Now try playing with the arrow keys, or with your mouse.

Answer 2

For the benefit of others, the Visual Studio Shift+F9 keyboard shortcut suddenly and mysteriously stopped working for me recently and after searching around for quite a while, I just finally tracked it down to the "Snagit" (version 11) app. The Snagit tray app uses Shift + F9 globally in Windows to start a video capture:

This overrides the Visual Studio keyboard shortcut... So I have now disabled the Snagit shortcuts in Tools>Program Preferences by selecting "None" for the dropdown key setting for all except the first one ("Print Screen"):

I hope this helps someone save some time!

Answer 3

I think I may have a solution for you:

Go to Tools->Options->Environment->Keyboard and set the Window.Dock shortcut to something you will almost never use. I tried SHIFT+CTRL+ALT+]

Then go to your View and click on QuickWatch so it has focus. Press whatever shortcut you used in the previous step!

This worked for me, and hopefully it does for you, as well!

EDIT: wcm is right that this does not work if you're looking specifically for the QuickWatch window because it steals focus and is a different sort of window than many of the others in VS. I am able to manipulate the window, even if off-screen, in Windows 7 by holding the windows key and then pressing the arrow keys. Up maximizes it and left and right move it in that direction in half-screen increments.