Visual C# 2005: A Developer's Notebook

Chapter 2. Visual Studio 2005

The Visual Studio 2005 IDE offers a number of new productivity features, including enhancements to the Visual Studio editor, pretested code snippets, enhanced IntelliSense, and significant help with creating and organizing your code. This chapter will explore the most useful and powerful of these changes.

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.

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 ...