Did you know… How to import and export settings in Visual Studio

This tip is for Visual Studio 2005.

A feature near and dear to my heart is the VSSettings feature, codename profiles.  This was my first feature I owned at M0 – meaning I was the QA while it was being designed.  I owned it for well over a year during its early development stages, until I moved to Window Management. 

To import and export settings
Go to Tools – Import Export Settings
Select whether you want to Import, Export, or Reset.  Note: A Reset is the same as doing an Import of every category.
Follow the wizard.

For example, say I need to export my favorite window layouts because I’m handing it off to a coworker or I need to, for whatever reason, reset my defaults.  Now there’s a really easy way to export this data to a .vssettings file, instead of having to shut down the shell and make a copy of the window layout .prf file in %AppData%

Exporting creates .vssettings files which you can sync multiple machines too, but this is a tip of the day for another day.