Visual Studio Hacks

Hack the Registry #30

Chapter 4, Customizing Visual Studio

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119

HACK

you will see another prompt confirming that the information has been

entered into your registry. Moving registry settings between computers using

this method is relatively easy and is the only way to move settings like Font

and Colors or editor settings between systems (unless you are using Visual

Studio 2005

[Hack #31]).

Use an Alternate Registry Tree

We authors always encourage our readers to back up their registry before

playing with it—if the wrong things are changed in the registry, Visual Stu-

dio won’t start or won’t work properly. Sometimes a reinstallation of Visual

Studio is necessary, which we all know uses hours of your time that you

won’t ever get back.

Visual Studio includes an alternative to backing up your registry. You can

actually switch the registry that Visual Studio uses! This way you can make a

copy of the current registry, tell Visual Studio to use that registry, hack the

registry settings to your heart’s content, and then if you have any issues, just

switch back to the old registry location.

The process for switching to an alternate registry is as follows:

1. Make a copy of the current registry. Using regedit,gotoHKEY_LOCAL_

MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\<7.1>, right-click on the

folder, and export the entire key to a .reg file.

2. Open the .reg file in a text editor and replace all instances of “\