Visual Studio Hacks

418

|

Chapter 13, Enhancing Visual Studio

#92 Manage Add-ins

HACK

It is usually a good idea to close Visual Studio before run-

ning any add-in installation programs. Most installation pro-

grams won’t stop you from installing with Visual Studio

open, but this can lead to strange behavior, especially if you

are uninstalling an old version of an add-in and installing a

new version.

Each add-in has to be added to the registry for every version of Visual Stu-

dio that it will run in. Because of this, you will sometimes run across an add-

in whose installer is configured to install for one version of Visual Studio,

but not the version you are using. You can often duplicate the registry set-

tings from one version and then move them to the other version, but this

won’t work all the time—in fact, it might not work most of the time—but

sometimes it is well worth a shot.

Here is the process for moving the registry settings from one version to

another:

1. Open regedit (Start

➝ Run ➝ type regedit).

2. Navigate to the following registry key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\

SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\<7.0>\AddIns\<YourAddin>.

3. Right-click on the key and choose Export from the context menu that

appears.

4. Save the .reg file to your computer.

5. Open the .reg file in Notepad and replace all instances of

\7.0\ with

\7.1\. (This would move settings from Visual Studio .NET 2002 to

Visual Studio .NET 2003. Use the version numbers ...