How to retrieve a tool window's position in Visual Studio

Question

In the Visual Studio extension I'm developing, I provide a custom tool window.

I'm trying to find out if the user has the tool window docked to a side (left/right/top/bottom) or if it is floating. Is there a way to calculate the current position of my tool window and is there an event to know after a user has completed moving it?

Some background: I'm developing the CodeStream extension for Visual Studio. There is functionality that when a user selects code we show three circle buttons in the CodeStream tool window (it's actually a webview) to provide some actions. When the CodeStream panel is docked to the right, the 3 buttons are on the left side of the panel and this is correct.

But, if a user moves the CodeStream panel to the left side of screen or elsewhere, I'd like to be able to know that so I can direct our webview to move the 3 buttons to the right side of the screen. I've provided two screenshots below.

We also have a VSCode extension and I've implemented similar logic there.

Answer 1

Take a look at the IVsWindowFrame.GetFramePos method:

using Microsoft.VisualStudio.Shell;
...
ThreadHelper.ThrowIfNotOnUIThread();

if (Package.GetGlobalService(typeof(Interop.IVsUIShell)) is Interop.IVsUIShell shellService)
{
    shellService.GetToolWindowEnum(out var toolWindows);

    foreach (Interop.IVsWindowFrame frame in ComUtilities.EnumerableFrom(toolWindows))
    {
        frame.GetProperty((int)VsFramePropID.DocView, out var docView);
        if (docView?.GetType().FullName == "MyNamespace.MyToolWindow")
        {
            frame.GetFramePos(out var pos, out var guid, out int px, out int py, out int pcx, out int pcy);

            // Do something

            break;
        }
    }
}

I have not explored the usage of the values provided by GetFramePos . The docs say "Returns the position of the window," so presumably they are useful for that purpose.

(There may be a more expedient way to obtain the target Interop.IVsWindowFrame than enumerating all the tool windows as in the above example... that's just what I was doing when I discovered this method.)