VS 2005+

Transfer Visual Studio Settings Between PCs

Visual Studio has many hundreds of settings that can be configured using the Options dialog box from the Tools menu. If you use several computers, it can be useful to configure the environment on one machine, then transfer the settings to other systems.

Transferring Settings

To transfer your Visual Studio options and settings between machines, you must follow a two-stage process. Firstly, you use the Import and Export Settings wizard to export the configuration to a named vssettings file. This type of file can hold all of the various configuration options that Visual Studio provides.

Once the file has been created, it must be placed into a folder that is visible to the machine that you are copying the configuration to. You then use the Import and Export wizard for a second time to load the options into the other installation of Visual Studio. The importing process can be repeated for each development PC for which you wish to duplicate the environment options.

Saving Settings

To save the current configuration, you must use the export settings function. To start the wizard, select "Import and Export Settings..." from the Tools menu.

The "Export selected environment settings" option should be selected before pressing the Next button.

The second step of the wizard is to select the options that you wish to save. The settings are displayed in a tree so that you can select to export individual sets of options or larger groups of settings depending upon your requirements. As you select options, a description is displayed. Once you have selected the desired items, click the Next button.

On the next screen you can provide the name for your new settings file and the location in which to save the file. Enter these details and press the Finish button to complete the process. The file will be created and a success message should be displayed.