winlayout

A utility to save and restore window positions on a Windows Desktop.

Install and Use GUI

On the Windows Desktop that you wish to manage: Download and unzip WinLayout-UI.zip and run the WinLayout-UI.exe file. Click the Save button to record the current window locations. Click the Restore button to restore the saved window locations.

Alternatively, Install and Use Command Line

With the laptop running on the docking station, and application windows in their desired locations, download winLayout.exe run the command:

winlayout save

Then the next time the laptop is plugged into the docking station, the window locations of the running applications can be restored by the command:

winlayout restore

For convenience, make a windows short cut to the file winlayout.exe (with the desired parameter) and pin to the task bar for easy access.

Building the command line .exe

Install .Net 5 SDK onto the developer machine. In the folder, in a cmd shell, run the commands

cd <folder containing winlayout.csproj>

dotnet build

dotnet publish -r win10-x64 -c Release /p:PublishSingleFile=true

Building the Winforms .exe

Install .Net 5 SDK onto the developer machine. In the folder, in a cmd shell, run the commands

cd <folder containing winlayout-ui.csproj>

dotnet build

dotnet publish -r win10-x64 -c Release /p:PublishSingleFile=true /p:IncludeNativeLibrariesForSelfExtract=true

Tips

If some windows do not change position when a restore is performed, it might be that these windows are running under Administrator privilege. In this case, run winlayout restore as Administrator and they will move. Visual Studio is commonly affected in this way. Similarly for the Winforms App .exe.