Visual Studio has some settings that you can get to only through the registry. You'll need to be careful, but you can do some incredible things in there.
The Visual Studio registry contains a host
of settings. Some of these settings can be accessed from the normal
Tool
Visual Studio stores most settings in two
different places in the registry. The first section is located under
HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Microsoft/VisualStudio/<7.1>
and stores all of the user-specific settings. This section
includes settings for the various editors, external tools, source
control, and just about everything located in Tools
The other place that Visual Studio stores settings is under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Software/Microsoft/VisualStudio/<7.1>. The systemwide settings are stored in this location. Any changes here will affect all users of the system as opposed to just your own settings.
Between these two locations, you can modify just about any setting in Visual Studio. Most of the registry keys and values are human readable. Figure 4-17 shows an example of some of the settings that can be modified in the registry.
I am not going to cover individual registry settings in this hack, since we cover those in other hacks. Many of the settings that once had to be edited directly through the registry, like the recent file and projects list [Hack #13] and custom file extensions [Hack #29], can now be edited using a power toy like VSTweak.
Some settings can still be edited only through the registry, and if
there is something you can't find in any of the
power toys or on the Tools
Moving registry settings is a fairly simple procedure, but one that can often be fraught with danger. A good rule of thumb to follow is to move only settings that you understand. Your instinct might be to copy the entire settings tree, and while this might work, it can also cause some issues (especially with recent file and project lists, since those file and projects might not be in the same place and could cause huge delays when opening Visual Studio).
To move registry settings from one machine to another, all you need
to do is open regedit (Start
After clicking Export, you will be prompted for a place to save a .reg file. After saving this file, you can move it to another machinewhen you double-click on the file on the new machine, you will be prompted to confirm that you want to add this information to your registry. After clicking Yes, 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] ).
We authors always encourage our readers to back up their registry before playing with itif the wrong things are changed in the registry, Visual Studio 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:
Make a copy of the current registry. Using regedit, go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\<7.1>, right-click on the folder, and export the entire key to a .reg file.
Open the .reg file in a text editor and replace all instances of "\7.1" with "\7.1Hacks". (7.1 being the version of Visual Studio that you are using.)
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 registry 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
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 closing 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.