Visual Studio Hacks

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Chapter 4, Customizing Visual Studio

#31 Save and Move Your IDE Settings

HACK

3. Double-click on the .reg file, which will load all the keys into your

registry.

If you also want to move your user-specific settings, you should repeat the

preceding process for the key located at HKEY_CURRENT_USER\

SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\<7.1>. You don’t have to copy over

your user settings though; when you start Visual Studio with the new regis-

try tree, it will create a new set for you automatically.

After creating the new registry, you next need to tell Visual Studio to use the

new registry by using the

/rootsuffix switch. Go to Start ➝ Run and type

devenv.exe /rootstuffix Hacks—this will launch Visual Studio using the

new registry tree. Notice that you should type only

Hacks and not 7.1Hacks,

since Hacks is the suffix that you are adding onto the end of the current key.

When Visual Studio opens, it will be running using the new registry, and

you can play around as much as you want and switch back by simply clos-

ing Visual Studio and opening it without using the switch. If you wanted to

switch to a different registry for an extended amount of time, you could

always create a shortcut that includes the switch.

HACK

#31

Save and Move Your IDE Settings Hack #31

Move all your customizations from one computer to another with Visual

Studio 2005.

Throughout this chapter, we have looked at numerous ways that you