Upon some further investigation, the built in configuration options for managing all kinds of settings, environment options, shortcuts etc, are extensive and fairly easy to use.

From the Tools Menu select Import and Export Settings. In Visual Studio 2005 this brings up a dialog that allows you to:

• Export your current settings (all or some of them) to a file.
• Import predefined settings packages, or a previously saved set (all or some of them)
• Reset all Settings. (Use this one to start over from one of the predefined packages.)

If you select Import selected environment settings, and then click next you get another dialog that gives you the opportunity to save your existing settings to a file, or just import new settings and overwrite your existing ones.

I selected the second option. This brings you to yet another dialog, this one containing the list of predefined sets of settings. The list available will vary depending on what edition you have and what server technologies you have installed, e.g. SQL Server.

Select one of those offered, and then hit next. (You can also browse for a saved package or file someone else sent you etc.)

On this next dialog, you will see a tree view control with three main nodes called:

• General Settings
• Help Filters and Favorites
• Options

Clear all of them by selecting the All Settings node, then you can expand each of the nodes and subnodes in the tree view to see what is available for you to import. Watch out for the settings with the little Yellow Exclamation point symbol next to them. Changing these settings according to the explanatory text could "compromise" your development environment.

I imagine some of these settings are mutually exclusive or cross dependant on other settings. So be forewarned. However there is always the option to Reset All again!

Cheers,

Robert Porter