I'm sure this is a common problem, but I can't find much info about it.
Problem
I have a work computer, a home computer, a surface, and maybe some Azure VMs that i'd like my visual studio 2013 extensions synced across them. I seem to have to refresh/wipe a computer fairly often, and re-installing all the extensions I like to use is sort of a pain. I initally thought the new VS Profiles would do this, but apparently they only sync themes/general settings.
Attempted/Outdated Solutions
There used to be an extenstion that apparently did this
Extension Sync
But that looks like it's only for VS 2010. There was also a blog post that showed the location that the extensions were saved in.
http://www.larswilhelmsen.com/2012/01/08/syncing-visual-studio-extensions-and-settings-with-dropbox/
Which looked like a perfect solution, except in 2013/2013 the extensions location must have changed, and I cannot find them.
Question
Does anyone know how I could sync my extensions across multiple machines? Or possibly know the location that the Extensions are stored in and if it's possible to change that location to something like Dropbox/Skydrive/Google Drive?
If you've upgraded to Visual Studio 2015 there's a new extension that Microsoft just released for it called the Roaming Extension Manager.
It sounds like this is what you are looking for.
https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/7b421a95-c32c-4433-a2be-a41b276013ab?SRC=Home
There's something called the "User State Migration Tool" that is intended for preserving state in corporate PC desktop deployments for wipe-and-load, similar to your Azure scenario.
If you know something about the way the extension settings are saved (as shown in the blog), it's not too hard to construct an XML descriptor and use the deployment tool to apply the settings. The tool is command line so it is easily automated.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh825142.aspx
This solution has increasing value when you have more than just Visual Studio to migrate into your VM.
there is new Extention for Visual Studio 2022 there which allow to import/export
Extension Manager
Related
TL;DR: Has anyone found a way to open folders in WSL2 using Visual Studio 2022?
Context: I am developing a C/C++ Linux software. Currently, I am using VisualStudio Code to open and edit source files. Now, I am way more efficient with Visual Studio 2022 and I cannot find a way to open folders inside of WSL2. (Single files work, but that is nearly not good enough for a proper workflow).
I have tried following this answer, but it does not do what I need.
Further, according to this MS devblog, quote:
"Our C++ cross-platform support in Visual Studio assumes that all source files originate in the Windows file system." This is not the case for me, my files originate in WSL2 and making them originate in Windows would be a hassle that would outweigh the benefits gained from working with VS2022.
Note: I only want to write code this way. Building and running the software is done somewhere else.
Anyone managed to make this work?
It is not possible at this moment according to https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/debug-your-net-core-apps-in-wsl-2-with-visual-studio/#comment-7947
https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/t/cant-debug-dotnet-core-project-in-wsl/1554569
The feedback was from Oct 19, 2021. I am very disappointed.
Currently the extension only support opening projects that are stored in the windows disks (it leverages WSLs automount feature). If opening from a network location is something you need please add it as a suggestion on Developer Community.
Ok, before I explain in detail, here's my (very odd) setup:
Hardware: iMac
OS: Mountain Lion
Software:
Editor (Mac): Sublime 2
Virtualization: Parallels Running Windows Server 2008
IDE (Windows): Visual Studio 2010
Source Control (Windows): Team Foundation Server
So here's my dilemma.
I looooove Sublime 2. However, being a Microsoft shop at my workplace, I have no choice but to deal with TFS. I don't do a lot of back-end coding, I'm a front-end guy and don't need all the hefty class and structure tracking built into Visual Studio, so Sublime is perfect for me.
One of the things I love about Sublime is that I can hit cmd+p and pull up any file immediately. The alternative is spending several minutes sifting through our file structure to locate the same file (we have a massive project structure...it's a beast).
Unfortunately, I can't just tap cmd+p and pull up any file...I can...but after editing it, I hit save and "uh oh! file isn't checked out, it's read only". I then have to switch spaces, spend several minutes sifting through directories to locate that same file I worked on, and check it out. Switch back, save, and then check it in. It wastes a lot of my time and defeats the time-saving benefits of Sublime's file searching.
What I'd like to know is if there's an easier way to accomplish this. I've tried a few things and none have panned out. I found a plugin that integrates TFS with Sublime - but that only works for Windows. I tried using Eclipse with a TFS plugin, but I still have to browse through a massive directory structure to check out the file in Eclipse before editing it in Sublime.
Is there any way to streamline this process better? I know it might sound silly to go through such extremes to save a minute or two here & there, but when I do this hundreds of times a day, it starts to save a LOT of time!
Thanks in advance to the community for any help on this!
If you can persuade your TFS Admin team to upgrade to TFS 2012 you will have your solution. TFS 2012 supports "Local Workspace" which does not keep files read-only on disk. You download your source code once through Visual Studio or Eclipse and keep working in ANY editor you want. TFS Client tracks changes on the file system and you just need VS or Eclipse to check-in your work at the end of the day.
For TFS 2008 and 2010 you have to check-out your files manually or with the help of a supported IDE. Those versions only support "server workspace"s and that flavour of workspace keeps all files on disk as read-only.
You might have another chance with 2008 or 2010 tough. TFS 2008 and TFS 2010 on Windows platform supports offline working, which temporarily disconnects your workspace from the server to do your work. Then at the end of the day you go back online and TFS client tries to "detect" what changes were made when you were offline and lets you check them in. This blog post says Team Explorer Everywhere supports offline work. You might need to remove read-only flags of files manually. Offline working is not perfect even on Windows platform and you need to be careful until you get used to it but I believe it is worth giving a shot.
If upgrading to TFS 2012 is an option then you probably want to consider it.
TFS2012 with local workspaces no longer require files to be checked out in visual studio first (files are no longer marked as readonly, and vs detects changes from other programs). This will get rid of one of your alt-tabs to windows.
You'd still have to alt-tab back to check in, you could potentially use a commandline "tf checkin" if you don't want to keep visual studio open.
So after trying several suggestions from here, among a few I found elsewhere, I've come to the conclusion that the best setup (for me) is as follows:
Editor (Mac): Sublime 2
Editor (PC): Sublime 2 with TFS plugin
Virtualization: Parallels Running Windows Server 2008
IDE (Windows): Visual Studio 2010 Source Control
(Windows): Team Foundation Server
So as you can see I updated my existing setup with one slight tweak. On my Windows side, I installed Sublime 2 and installed the TFS plugin. If I want to check out a file, I switch to windows, search for the file, check it out via Sublime's TFS plugin, then switch back to the Mac. It's certainly not ideal, and requires an extra step, but it seems to work the best for me and is faster than using Visual Studio to check in/out.
If anyone comes up with a more elegant setup (aside from using TFS 2012 - which thankfully is coming for my organization), I'd love to hear about it. In the meantime, I hope this helps anyone else who might be using a setup similar to mine.
Recently, the SourceSafe integration into visual studio has started to perform badly because we have moved, and the SourceSafe "server" is located across a VPN which goes across a slow connection. This has made loading large projects in visual c++ 6 take 5+ minutes because it has to talk to the "server" for each project. Also, there are some bugs that are dangerous in the integration (the auto-checkout of certain shared projects will do a get latest on the wrong version of a branched file). This has caused me to want to disable the SourceSafe integration, however I have not found any menu option or uninstall option. Google has reported a few registry tweaks, but none of them seemed to work.
Does anyone know of an easy way to remove the SourceSafe integration from Visual C++ 6, without uninstalling SourceSafe altogether?
From http://support.microsoft.com/kb/236399:
Source code control software, such as
Microsoft Visual SourceSafe, that
integrates with the Visual C++
integrated development environment
(IDE) can be configured to connect to
a source code server during Visual C++
startup. In such cases, a loss in
network connectivity will cause Visual
C++ to start up very slowly. To
improve performance, either ensure
proper network connectivity or disable
the source code control software
integration with the Visual C++ IDE.
To do the latter, quit Visual C++, and
then use RegEdit.Exe to locate the
following registry key and set its
Disabled value to (DWORD) 0x00000001:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\DevStudio\6.0\Source Control\Disabled
I followed this and it seemed to work upon trying it again. I think I might've had a second copy of visual studio running when I did it the first time.
Open the .dsp and .dsw file in a text editor, and remove the respective entries from the .dsp and the .dsw file. Also, delete the .scc files.
There is a Microsoft Knowledge Base article about how to do exactly this.
The gist of it is that you must manually edit the .dsw and .dsp files in a text editor, and remove a few other files lying around. See the article for more details.
If the solutions mentioned above fail for you do this:
Rename folder: \Program Files\Microsoft\%vs%\Common7\IDE\VS SCC
VS will complain once about plug in not being there and you say "Yes" to ignore it in perpetuity.
All files “got latest,” “read only,” and edited in VS, will make VS complain and offer to “override”, which works fine for me.
What do you gain:
Open VSS-linked solutions quickly without VS matching contents to VSS server.
Open VSS-linked solutions and EDIT the files at will without being bogged down in “check out” bs.
This makes using other distributed source control system on top of project tree with VSS bindings painless.
VSS client still works by itself just fine, including diff, checkout, checkin.
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\DevStudio\6.0\Source Control\Disabled
I followed this and it seemed to work upon trying it again. I think I might've had a second copy of visual studio running when I did it the first time.
Its working .....Thanks Ajay
What has worked for us, and is much easier, requires no registry/file editing by hand, and safer I think is this:
1) Exit Visual Studio completely.
2) Disconnect from the network (unplug the cable and turn off wireless, or disable the network adapters)
3) Open the VS6 workspace (DSW) for the project. When it starts up it will find it cannot connect with the VSS database it wants to and ask you about that...
4) Tell VS to never try to reconnect to the source control db in the future.
5) Done... VS does all the changes to THAT WORKSPACE/PROJECT setup for you. You are not disconnecting VS from source control in general (like a registry edit would do) and your not manually editing files.
Our company is considering using the Visual Studio Shell for one of our products.
Does anyone have any experience using it? Was it easy to work with? Did it save time? Are there any things that you weren't able to get it to do? Have you shipped anything with it?
A couple of points regarding the Isolated shell.
As you might know, there are two considerations when you use shell - Isolated Mode and Integrated Mode. (Read more from MSDN)
Isolated Shell can be used by organizations, to build applications that run side by side with other editions of Visual Studio.
Here are some points we learned,
trying to use shell for some of our
applications.
If you are planning to use Isolated
shell, you can't use Microsoft
Language Packages like C# and VB.NET
inside that.
Creating a package for your shell is
much like creating any other VS
Package.
You don't have support for Team
Explorer and VS Built in Source
Control access, in Isolated Shell
(See this post from Vin)
Though not directly related - If you are using VS SDK 1.1 to develop your packages - remember that the managed package framework is no longer available with the default distribution. So don't get surprised if your old packages can't load MPF files after moving to SDK 1.1. It has got moved to Codeplex as a separate download.
I played around a bit with it a couple of weeks ago, like every thing there is going to be a learn curve but if you study the examples a bit and have a look at a project on codeplex called Storyboard designer. I'm sure that you could pick it up, I found it very hard to find other examples on the net but I wasn't looking very hard.
I would say if you think that the shell can give you want you need I would go for it, it is a very handy interface to work with and if your targeting developers it is also a common interface for them, so it will feel natural.
I typically use Visual Studio Community on my PC for developing business intelligence solutions (databases, SSIS, SSAS, SSRS), then deploying to the server. A few weeks ago my managers requested we put Visual Studio on a server so that other developers and consultants could connect to the server and access Visual Studio.
Ultimately I installed SQL Server Data Tools (14.0.61021.0), which automatically installed Visual Studio Shell 2015. After installation, I launched Visual Studio Shell and tried doing some of the things I am used to doing in Community edition. I was able to do pretty much anything I was used to doing for BI Development.
Visual Studio Shell 2015:
Solution files with BI projects...
SSIS
Installing extensions & add-ons...
ANKHSVN for version control with SVN server
Visual Studio 2015 Color Theme Editor
Project deployment
I am developing an Isolated Shell that caters to "designers/special content creators" performing specific tasks, using the Shell. As they operate on files, they need to be able to use TFS for source control. This is mainly due to the fact that Developers will also operate on the same files from TFS but using Visual studio 2008.
After looking and searching I still could not find Team Explorer to be available to Shell.
Asking on MSDN forums, lead me to the answer that "this is not supported yet in the Isolated Shell". Well, then the whole point of giving away a shell is not justified, if you want to use a source control system for your files. The idea is not to recreate everything and develop tool windows etc using the TFS provider API.
The Visual Studio Extensibility book by Keyven Nayyeri has an example, which only goes so far into this problem of adding a sc provider.
Has anyone worked on developing Visual Studio 2008 Isolated Shell applications/environment? Please provide comments, questions - anything that you have to share apart from the following threads, which I've already participated in.
Threads from MSDN forums:
Team Explorer for Isolated Shell
Is it possible to use Team Explorer in VS Shell Isolated?
Thanks for your answer. Yes you are right, we will acquire CALs for users without having to buy them Visual Studio, that's the direction we will be taking.
But I am yet to figure out how to make Team Explorer available to such users, inside Shell. So I am looking to find out the technical details of how that can be done.
I mean, I have a user, he installs my VS Shell application, he has no VStudio Team system on his machine. Now if I acquire CAL for TFS and install Team Explorer, do you think it will be automatically available in the VS Shell app?
Any ideas? have you worked on making this happen?
Thanks
It sounds like you are trying to allow the "special content creators" save files in TFS Source Control without having to buy them a license to a Visual Studio Team Edition -- correct me if I'm wrong.
If that's the case, unfortunately I believe that you can't quite do that. Your users still need a Client Access License ("CAL") to access TFS.
I think that you can acquire just CALs for your users without having to buy Visual Studio for them (I presume for less than a full blown Visual Studio would cost). At that point, you can just distribute to them the Team Explorer, which is a VS shell with nothing but TFS access components. That is available in your TFS server media.
I found this via Google. You might want to review it to decide your best options:
Visual Studio Team System 2008 Licensing White Paper
The only exception to the CAL rules I'm aware of is access to Work Items. Assuming properly licensed servers, anyone in your organization can create new Work Items or view and update existing ones created by them, using the Work Item Web Access component.
Just stumbled on this question, it might still be relevant to you.
You have the option of including the AnkhSVN (http://ankhsvn.open.collab.net/) packages and load it into your Isolated Shell. While there are some issues around it, with Subversion support, you could use SvnBridge to access TFS repositories. This might bring you a little bit closer to the process you are trying to achieve.