Visual CSharp 1002005 A Developers Notebook [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

2.1. 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.

2.1.1. 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 Tools
Options and then
selecting Help/Import and Export Settings. There you will find a text
box and a button that will open a disk browser.

Note: Customize Visual Studio .NET 2005 to your own needs and
bring those settings to other development machines.

You can also export your settings to
a configuration file to bring to another computer by choosing Tools

Import/Export Settings. The
Import and Export Settings Wizard opens, asking if you want to export
selected settings, import settings, or reset all your settings to one
of the default collections, as shown in Figure 2-1.

Once you select that you want to export settings, you are prompted to
choose which settings you want to export. The wizard points out which
of those setting changes might have security implications, as shown
in Figure 2-2.

Note that each category has a plus sign; you can open the category
and pick and choose which settings to export, as shown in Figure 2-2.

The next step is to name your settings file (the wizard suggests a
name) and to choose an export location, as shown in Figure 2-3.

When you click Finish the file is saved. Now you are free to copy the
file to another machine, and import it.

2.1.1.1 Importing the settings you saved

On the new machine, select Tools
Import/Export Settings
once again. The wizard intervenes, asking if you want to save your
current settings (and if so, where) or if you want to just overwrite
them, as shown in Figure 2-4.

Click Next and you are asked which collection of settings you want to
import (this matches the collection you chose when you first started
Visual Studio 2005), as shown in Figure 2-5.

Highlight one set of strings and click Next. That imports the
strings, which you can then adjust by selecting Tools
Options, just as you
could your old settings.

2.1.2. What about...

...specifying that all members of my team are to use the same
settings for the editor, but are free to choose their own settings
for the debugger?

In the Import/Export dialog box, create a unique
.vsssettings file that specifies settings for
the editor, but not other parts of Visual Studio. You do this by
exporting only the Text Editor settings under the Tools
Option section.

When the file is imported, its settings will override only the
settings for the editor. All other settings will be unaffected.

...what happens if I want to provide a single
.vsssettings file to be used by many computers?

In this case, save the settings file to a folder on your network (or
just copy the file from machine to machine). Then import the settings
to every computer.

2.1.3. Where can I learn more?

The Visual Studio 2005 Help files contain
lots of information about controlling your
environment settings. You can also
learn a great deal just by clicking Tools
Options and poking around
in the settings windows, paying particular attention to the changes
in the Windows Form Designer (which, for example, defaults to layout
mode) and the new tools in the Toolbox.