Chapter 2

Figure 2-21

Saving and importing Visual Studio settings

Visual Studio 2005 allows for a tremendous number of customizations and modifications to the development environment and the development experience. You can do a lot to change Visual Studio either by dragging elements and components to new locations within the IDE, or by choosing Tools Options in the Visual Studio menu bar to bring up the Options dialog shown in Figure 2-22.

The number of options that you can work with from this dialog are staggering and impossible to cover completely in this chapter. You have many of the same options that you worked with in the past, plus some new ones.

After you have Visual Studio set up as you want, you should save these settings so that they can be used again if you rebuild your computer, if you are working with a different instance of Visual Studio elsewhere, or if you want to share your settings with others. To save your settings, chooseTools Import/Export Settings in the IDE. This pulls up the Import/Export Settings dialog shown in Figure 2-23.

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Visual Studio 2005

Figure 2-22

Figure 2-23

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Chapter 2

From this dialog, you can either save your settings to a file that can be used elsewhere or you can import settings that are stored in the same type of file. You can also just reset Visual Studio to return the settings to the default that existed when Visual Studio was first installed and run.

If you are going to export your settings, select Export IDE Settings to a File. This shows a list of exportable settings in the left-hand pane of the dialog. By default, almost everything is selected. Feel free to uncheck the settings that you don’t want to export. When this is set as you want, choose the name of the file and the location where you want to save the file. The file has a .vssettings extension. If you go back and look at the file, notice that Visual Studio saves the settings as an XML file.

Importing the settings is simply the process of making reference through the Import/Export Settings dialog to a file of the same type.

Summar y

This chapter took a quick look at the best possible tool for creating ASP.NET 2.0 applications — Visual Studio 2005. This tool is unquestionably packed with functionality and makes you a more productive developer.

Included in this IDE are a number of wizards that make quick work of common programming tasks and allow you to concentrate on getting your applications live as soon as possible. Visual Studio 2005 expands on allowing developers to code to the database, to classes, and to the presentation layer — all from the same IDE.

This chapter was in no way meant to fully explain this IDE; my intention was to show you some of the newer features that you might utilize when building your applications. Delve more deeply into what is shown in the chapter, and you will find new features around every corner.

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