Visual Studio 2010 IDE : Managing User Settings

When you run Visual Studio for the first time, you are asked to specify a setting set that best suits your needs. Then you can customize Visual Studio settings and options to make the IDE the best environment for you. Starting from Visual Studio 2005 the IDE provides the ability of exporting settings to disk into a .VsSettings file as a backup for later reuse, meaning that you have also the ability of importing existing settings into the environment. This section explains how you manage Visual Studio settings.

Exporting Settings

You export Visual Studio settings by selecting the Tools, Import and Export Settings command. This launches the Import and Export Settings Wizard, whose first dialog is shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Starting the Import and Export Settings Wizard.

From here you can decide what you want to do, in this case exporting settings, so leave unchanged the default option and then click Next. The second dialog enables deep selections over the available settings to export. Figure 2 shows the full list of available settings.

Figure 2. Selecting settings to export.

Basically you can export all settings available in the Options dialog and other settings such as code analysis, database tools, and general development settings. After you select the desired settings, click Next. In the next dialog you will be asked to specify a filename and the target folder. By default Visual Studio 2010 proposes a filename based on the current date/time and the user level settings folder as the target folder, as demonstrated in Figure 3.

Figure 3. Providing the target filename and folder for exporting settings.

At this point just click Finish to save your settings to disk and return to the IDE. For importing saved settings later, read the next section.

Importing Settings

To import existing settings, select again Tools, Import and Export Settings. When the wizard appears, select Import Selected Environment Settings (refer to Figure 1). The second dialog asks your agreement for backing up the current settings before proceeding (see Figure 4). This is your choice. After you’ve decided, click Next.

Figure 4. The second dialog of the wizard enables backing up current settings.

In the final dialog the wizard asks you to select settings to import from the list of available settings. Notice how the .vssettings file saved during the example of the preceding section is in the list (see Figure 5).

Figure 5. Selecting settings to be imported into the IDE.

 

 

Tip

Notice that you can import only one settings file.

Select the desired settings file and then click Finish. At this point selected settings replace existing ones.