Hack 31. Save and Move Your IDE Settings
Move all your customizations from one computer
to another with Visual Studio 2005.
Throughout this chapter, we have looked
at numerous ways that you can customize Visual Studio to your needs,
and in each section, we have looked at ways to move those
customizations between machines, usually involving a power toy or
manually copying a file to another system.
Visual Studio 2005 adds another way to move settings between machines
by using a new
import and export settings dialog.
This dialog can be accessed by going to Tools
Import/Export Settings. You will then see the screen shown in Figure 4-19.
From this dialog, you can select the settings that you want to export
from the tree view. The tree view list includes just about all of the
settings that we have talked about in this chapter, including all of
the settings in the Tool Options window. After you click
Export Settings, Visual Studio will save
a
.vssettings file to the location of your choice.
The .vssettings file is a mixture of
XML and binary data (the
structure of the file is XML, but the value of some nodes is binary).
Take a look at the file using any text editor, and you will notice
that settings like key bindings
are stored in binary and are not easily editable. Some of the other
settings are stored as plain text and could be changed manually if
you wanted to do so.
The .vssettings file can be copied to another
system and then imported using this same window. You simply need to
select the second radio button labeled "Import IDE
settings from a file," and you will see the dialog
shown in Figure 4-20.
After selecting the file that you exported, you will see it listed on
the left side; on the right side, you will be able to select what
settings you would like to import from the file. After selecting the
file to import from, as well as the settings to import, click the
Import Settings button, and Visual Studio will then import all of
these settings into the new installation of Visual Studio.
You can also restore Visual Studio to one of the default
configurations. To do so, you first need to select the Reset IDE
Settings option in the options group at the top of the window. You
will then see the screen shown in Figure 4-21.
This screen displays the default Visual Studio configurations. You
can select one of the configurations from the list and then click
Reset Settings to restore all the Visual Studio settings to one of
the default configurations.
This method of moving configuration settings is much preferred to the
myriad of things you had to do manually with previous versions of
Visual Studio, including copying files, using power toys, and backing
up the registry.
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A cool byproduct of this feature is the ability developers now have
to easily share their Visual Studio configurations. If you want to
show someone how you set up Visual Studio, you can simply send them
your .vssettings file or even post it out on
your blog for the entire world to check out (and ridicule you for
using granny fonts or green type on a black background).
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