Section 2.1. Configure and Save Your Developer Environment | Visual C# 2005: A Developers Notebook

2.1. Configure and Save Your Developer Environment

Visual Studio 2005 is designed to enable extensive customization. For instance, you can control which tool windows are shown and how they are laid out, the placement and naming of menu commands, shortcut key combinations, help filters, and so forth.

You are encouraged to set up your development environment to match your own programming style. You can save these settings and bring them to other development machines, allowing you to have the same development environment settings on all the machines you work on. In addition, a team can share consistent settings, reducing confusion and simplifying code maintenance.

2.1.1. How do I do that?

After you install Visual Studio 2005, the first time you open the program you are asked to choose a configuration. The configuration you choose is saved, along with any adjustments you make later to the IDE's look and feel, in a file named currentsettings.vssetting. Changes to your settings are saved for you automatically in that same file.

The default location for the settings file is [...]visual studio\settings\currentsettings.vssettings, but you can change that location by selecting Tools Options and then selecting Help/Import and Export Settings. There you will find a text box and a button that will open a disk browser.

Note: Customize Visual Studio .NET 2005 to your own needs and bring those settings to other development machines.

You can also export your settings to a configuration file to bring to another computer by choosing Tools Import/Export Settings. The Import and Export Settings Wizard opens, asking if you want to export selected settings, import settings, or reset all your settings to one of the default collections, as shown in Figure 2-1.

Figure 2-1. The Import and Export Settings Wizard

Once you select that you want to export settings, you are prompted to choose which settings you want to export. The wizard points out which of those setting changes might have security implications, as shown in Figure 2-2.

Figure 2-2. Choosing settings to export

Note that each category has a plus sign; you can open the category and pick and choose which settings to export, as shown in Figure 2-2.

The next step is to name your settings file (the wizard suggests a name) and to choose an export location, as shown in Figure 2-3.

Figure 2-3. Naming your export settings file and choosing an export location

When you click Finish the file is saved. Now you are free to copy the file to another machine, and import it.

2.1.1.1 Importing the settings you saved

On the new machine, select Tools Import/Export Settings once again. The wizard intervenes, asking if you want to save your current settings (and if so, where) or if you want to just overwrite them, as shown in Figure 2-4.

Figure 2-4. Saving settings before importing

Click Next and you are asked which collection of settings you want to import (this matches the collection you chose when you first started Visual Studio 2005), as shown in Figure 2-5.

Figure 2-5. Choosing a collection to import

Highlight one set of strings and click Next. That imports the strings, which you can then adjust by selecting Tools Options, just as you could your old settings.

2.1.2. What about...

...specifying that all members of my team are to use the same settings for the editor, but are free to choose their own settings for the debugger?

In the Import/Export dialog box, create a unique .vsssettings file that specifies settings for the editor, but not other parts of Visual Studio. You do this by exporting only the Text Editor settings under the Tools Option section.

When the file is imported, its settings will override only the settings for the editor. All other settings will be unaffected.

...what happens if I want to provide a single .vsssettings file to be used by many computers?

In this case, save the settings file to a folder on your network (or just copy the file from machine to machine). Then import the settings to every computer.

2.1.3. Where can I learn more?

The Visual Studio 2005 Help files contain lots of information about controlling your environment settings. You can also learn a great deal just by clicking Tools Options and poking around in the settings windows, paying particular attention to the changes in the Windows Form Designer (which, for example, defaults to layout mode) and the new tools in the Toolbox.