Why are dialogs in Visual Studio fixed size?

Why are many dialogs within Visual Studio 200x made fixed size without option to resize them is beyond me. Take for example Choose Items… dialog for Toolbox. It looks ridiculously small on my 20″ LCD and I struggle to find the right components, specially as they usually have long namespace, assembly name and directory. It is really annoying all that scrolling and I wonder why is this pain really necessary? Just set it as resizable and resize the list accordingly – is this so difficult? Another example is WWF’s type picker, though this one is larger at least and I am sure that they are plenty of others. I don’t know – I’ve made suggestions to made all dialog resizable (those that make sense) a way back in time of Visual Studio 2002 or 2003. It was postponed.


IMO this is really an unnecessary annoyance dragging along all Visual Studio versions. Oh well, time to make suggestions for Orcas. I must hurry, otherwise they’ll be postponed.

One thought on “Why are dialogs in Visual Studio fixed size?

  1. I had exactly the same problem today when trying to hunt down COM components that I knew were located in a specific directory. The full path isn’t displayed, only in the tooltip when you hover over it.

    Annoying!

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