I've been reading through some documentation on a few of the new bells and whistles that Visual Studio 2005 has to offer, and I almost stood up in applause when I saw that importing and exporting of settings was finally going to be supported nativley in VS 2005. This developer has been wanting this for a long time.
I (like most developers) like to have my IDE configured in a very particular way. I like certain windows in a specific locations, my fonts/hilighting to be just so, I have a crazy set of keyboard shortcuts, and a host of external tools that I use on a regular basis. As you can imagine it takes quite a lot of time and effort to get all of these settings configured the way that I like them. Now think about having to re-install VS on a new machine, fresh install of Windows, a VM, or a second PC... that's a lot of wasted time doing the same work over and over again. Being a huge advocate of software reuseability this kind of repetition just drives me crazy. Since many of us (myself included) are still using VS 2003, we have to rely on some old school hackery to get the job done.
Many of the settings are stored in the windows registry, so all you have to do is find the necessary keys and save to a .REG file, and then later you can run those files to re-install the keys on the new VS install. So, fire up regedit, navigate to the key, right-click and select Export. The important keys for VS 2003 are:- KEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\7.1\External Tools
- HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\7.1\FontAndColors
- HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\7.1\Text Editor
Application Data directory. So just browse to C:\Documents and Settings\YOUR_USER_NAME\Application Data\Microsoft\VisualStudio\7.1\ and then save the following files:
- Keyboard schemes and shortcuts are stored in .vsk files.
- Toolbox data is in the toolbox.tbd file.
- Windows layout are in the devenv.xml file.
- Object Browser data is in the ObjBrow.dat file.
- Various settings from things like external add-ins and packages are stored in the ExtGlobals.dat file.
Even if you're not planning on having to configure a new install of VS 2003 anytime soon... I would still recommend exporting all of your settings for backup purposes. It's normally not something we think about, until its too late.
NOTE: The above mentioned registry keys and folder locations are also valid for VS 2002... you just need to replace the "7.1" with "7.0" in the path to each item.