Known Issues & Limitations

Current limitations of the extension. Most stem from Visual Studio shell constraints, not from bugs in the extension itself.

Restored panes don’t keep their exact position or grouping

When Restore panes on solution open reopens the panes you had open for a solution, they come back with their sessions and profiles intact and in the saved order, but not their exact dock position, size, or tab grouping. Visual Studio decides where each restored window lands.

Why: Visual Studio only honors a requested dock position the first time a tool window is shown, and exposes no reliable API to read back and reapply the precise layout of transient, multi-instance tool windows. Our panes are multi-instance and transient (they aren’t persisted by VS across sessions, on purpose, so VS’s global layout restore doesn’t fight our per-solution one), so VS has no stored slot to remember their placement.

Workaround: the panes are restored in the order you had them; arrange them once and Visual Studio tends to keep that arrangement for the rest of the session. Saving pixel-perfect layout per solution is not currently feasible with the available VS APIs.

A single loose file falls back to the home directory

Solutions, projects and opened folders give the pane a working directory. A single file opened on its own (File → Open → File), with no solution or folder around it, doesn’t; so the pane starts in your home directory instead.

Why: the file’s own folder isn’t a stable choice: it would change every time you switch tabs, while the working directory is fixed when the pane starts.

Workaround: none needed: the home directory is a reasonable fallback for a loose file. Low priority.

A box selection reports one of its lines, not the rectangle

Hold Alt and drag to select a vertical column across several lines, and the context that reaches Claude names a fragment of one line, not the block you highlighted. The badge shows that single line too.

Why: Visual Studio models a box selection as several independent fragments, one per line, and reports one of them as the primary selection. That is the right answer for multiple carets, where each is a separate gesture and one of them is the active one; a box is a single gesture whose lines are all equally meant, but the editor does not distinguish the two cases.

Workaround: for a block you want Claude to read, select it the ordinary way (without Alt). A box selection is usually a column edit, where the surrounding code is what matters and asking about it works anyway.

An MCP server that asks for input gets no answer

When an MCP server asks the user for something (a form, or a browser sign-in), the chat has no dialog for it and declines the request. A login that never prompts looks like a hang.

Workaround: sign in to that server from a terminal session first. With the log level at Warn the Output window says so: elicitation from MCP server '…' declined.