Peter's Gekko

But then again, this is only useful in some situations. In most situations (IMHO) you're hammering code, which is done in a textwindow and if that's too wide, reading the code becomes harder.

And why all the snap-ins docked to the right? :) You're reading from left to right so it's easier for the eye to start in the middle of the screen to read to the right than all the way to the left and end up in the middle, as most content is at the start of the lines, as not all lines are evenly long.

When I'm hammering code it's just the same. I want my solution explorer, class viewer and document outline. A slight turn of the head brings them into vision. All those moving windows make me totally nervous. The remaining real estate is big enough to set the font to a comfortable size without losing the end of the lines.

I also have a 1920x1200 widescreen monitor and it's unbelievebable ... it gives me enough space to have 4x3 area for writing a reading code and the rest of the screen for the tool windows.

But I also have a second monitor where I place unit testing, mail and other applications... this second monitor has a 1280x1024 resolution. What I'm planning to do is buy 2 widescreen TFT monitors for home and have an hybrid system of multi-wide-monitor :)

Anyway it would be more useful when Visual Studio supports multiple monitors.

Another one bites the marketing dust.

Only in very specific situations - like you've laid your windows out above, does it prove useful. In code, it helps to see height; more than it does to see width.

Press ALT+SHIFT+ENTER - and you have all the space u need.

It's a matter of taste. Mine is wide..

Hmmm... even so, I still like a dual monitor (with widescreen). I can pull my code up in one monitor and watch the app run in another. :)

I'm running on a Dell 2001FP (1600x1200)... just don't have the second monitor yet (waiting for another "good" sale).

I have a 15.4" 1680x1050 laptop, a 21" 1600x1200 lcd I dock it to at home, and dual 17" 1280x1024 lcds at work. For Visual Studio I prefer the 21", but that's mostly to do with the size of the text on screen. It's easy on the eyes. I much prefer the layout of the laptop's screen, allowing for the Toolbar on the left, and vertically stacked Properties/Solution view on the right.

Sahil has a definite point about vertical real-estate being prime, but once you get above 1000 pixels vertically, it's good to me. If a particular method eats much more real-estate than that, I probably need to refactor it. So I'd disagree that vertical real-estate is *always* better than horizontal. If I could have a 21" 1680x1050 widescreen, or even better, a 24" 1900x1200, I'd trade in 4:3 in a heart beat for work.

For non-work gaming and web-browsing it's no contest, the extra width of a wide-screen goes wasted nine times out of ten.

Damn right. 1200 high is enough, everything extra in the width is an extra luxury which can come in handy when you like it (like me).
Btw, I don't feel like biting any marketing dust, though if something like the Radius pivot would reenter the market I'm sold without ever having seen one in real life :)

Its kind of hard to use a dual monitor system sitting in my recliner or out in the yard -- but my widescreen works great in those situations. And I can still hook up a second monitor for those rare occasions that I actually sit at my desk. :)

It's almost weekend, I want to finish this week with some soundbites.
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I am just a basic computer user trying to decide whether to buy a widescreen to go with our new Mac mini.  I have heard good things about the NEC 90GX2 19" (standard dimension screen) and is only $259 at Best Buy.  But the salespeople say widescreen is the way of the future.  As an alternate, I'm considering a 20" Samsung widescreen for about $289.  We'll mainly just do websurfing and job-surfing and possibly some gaming, definitely check out iLife suite.  This is our first Mac.

I apologize crashing your Code-writers site, but I haven't found too many sites talking about this subject and would appreciate opinions.

That's OK,

A (widescreen) monitor is nice but can be a nightmare when the resolution is too high. There are a lot of widescreen laptops around which are unreadable. The only way to find out is to see the thing at work before you buy.