.NET Tips and Tricks

Blog archive

Protect Yourself: Export Visual Studio Settings

In many of these tips, I've suggested ways that you might want to change Visual Studio's default configuration. That's not always a good thing. For example, I've known some developers who, because of some problem, had to re-install Visual Studio and lost all their customizations. I sometimes find myself at a client's site, working on a computer that isn't mine and looking foolish because some customization I depend on is gone ... or I used to, at any rate.

The solution to both problems is some preventative maintenance: Export your Visual Studio settings to a vssettings file. You can then restore those settings in the event of a disaster or moving to a new machine.

To export a file, from the Tools menu, select "Export selected environment settings" and then click the Next button. On the next page, by default, all settings are selected and that's the option I use (I'm concerned that if start picking and choosing settings, I'll leave one of my customizations behind). On this page, therefore, all I need to do is click the Next button.

The third and final page allows me to choose where I'll save the resulting vssettings file. I save it to one of my cloud drives so that I won't lose the file if something happens to my computer.

When I need to set up a new instance of Visual Studio, I import the file and get back my own, personalized version of my favorite development environment. When I'm working at a client's site, I first export the settings on the computer I'm using. I then import my vssettings file from my cloud drive (or a USB on one occasion when I wasn't allowed Internet access).

Posted by Peter Vogel on 03/21/2019


comments powered by Disqus

Featured

  • Cloud-Focused .NET Aspire 9.1 Released

    Along with .NET 10 Preview 1, Microsoft released.NET Aspire 9.1, the latest update to its opinionated, cloud-ready stack for building resilient, observable, and configurable cloud-native applications with .NET.

  • Microsoft Ships First .NET 10 Preview

    Microsoft shipped .NET 10 Preview 1, introducing a raft of improvements and fixes across performance, libraries, and the developer experience.

  • C# Dev Kit Previews .NET Aspire Orchestration

    Microsoft's dev team has been busy updating the C# Dev Kit, a Visual Studio Code extension that enhances the C# development experience by providing tools for managing, debugging, and editing C# projects.

  • Hands On: New VS Code Insiders Build Creates Web Page from Image in Seconds

    New Vision support with GitHub Copilot in the latest Visual Studio Code Insiders build takes a user-supplied mockup image and creates a web page from it in seconds, handling all the HTML and CSS.

  • Naive Bayes Regression Using C#

    Dr. James McCaffrey from Microsoft Research presents a complete end-to-end demonstration of the naive Bayes regression technique, where the goal is to predict a single numeric value. Compared to other machine learning regression techniques, naive Bayes regression is usually less accurate, but is simple, easy to implement and customize, works on both large and small datasets, is highly interpretable, and doesn't require tuning any hyperparameters.

Subscribe on YouTube

Upcoming Training Events