Visual Studio Tips and Tricks

Productivity Driven Development

Switch Between Multiple Settings Quickly

| Comments

My Visual Studio setup at work is slightly different at work than at home, because of different monitor sizes. My environment is also significantly different when I am presenting or teaching. In the past, I used to save different settings for each environment and switch between them by going through the wizard at Tools->Import and Export Settings. Once I learned about the /ResetSettings command line switch for Visual Studio, I was able to come up with a faster way to switch settings.
This switch restores the default Visual Studio settings, but when you give it a .vssettings file, it’ll reset the settings to that file. I created and exported different .vssettings file for my different environments, and then created a new Visual Studio shortcut on my desktop for each environment. I updated the shortcuts to pass in the vssettings file corresponding to the environment.

Now all I need to do is use a different shortcut when changing environments.

Want to learn more about Visual Studio? Check out this Pluralsight Course.
Use SqlSmash to write maintainable SQL scripts, understand code faster and navigate around easily in SSMS.

Comments