Multiple windows in Visual Studio

Alt+Tab is for switching between applications on Windows.

To switch between windows within Visual Studio use Ctrl+Tab.

This should work on any mutli-windowed application.

You can change the window layout in the Tools menu under Options. The very first item is Environment\General. You can choose Multiple Documents (versus Tabbed Documents). That may give you the "look" you are describing.

However, I don't think it is possible to use alt+tab to change windows since those windows still belong to the single instance of VS2008. You can change windows with ctrl+F6. In addition, a nice trick when using Tabbed Documents is to press ctrl+alt+down arrow. That brings up a list of all open editor windows.

You can click on the tab of the window and drag outside making it a standalone window.