Finally (well, after 6 releases and 10+ years…) the Options window of Visual Studio 2013 will be resizable (at least in VS 2013 Preview it is), and of course it will remember the size between sessions. This opens an opportunity for better integration of “heavy” Visual Studio extensions (ie, with lots of options) that previously used its own Options window because they required more room or wanted to provide resizable listviews (like my MZ-Tools add-in).

The built-in VS options window has always provided a two-level navigation tree so, with the new resizing capability, it should meet the needs of most extensions, if not all. However:

– While many extensions need only “personal” settings, some extensions (like mine) provide also shared “team” settings, that are stored in a shared network folder and allow “read-only” access for team members that are not team leaders. This is because, as you know if you are a team leader, you may desire to enforce team settings, rather than just documenting and “telling” the team members the settings that they should use (ex: this company uses 3 spaces indentation, rather than the default 4). Visual Studio doesn’t provide this capability.

– If your extension targets several Visual Studio versions, you need to wait some years until VS 2013 is the lowest one that your extension supports.