I and my team spent the last few months defining rules about C# code formatting and style for our project, so we ended up with an .editorconfig file.
Moreover, we all installed the extension Productivity Power Tools, in order to format the code when saving the file (CTRL+S) rather than having to use the VS built-in feature Code Clean Up. We took this decision when we realized that the latter requires a special shortcut (CTRL+K, CTRL+E) and that every member of the team needs to set this setting locally, since there is no way to put it in the source control.
This way of working went great with VS 2019.
But, in the last month most members of the team upgraded to VS 2022 and the extension Productivity Power Tools 22 removed - apparently without any reason - the Format On Save and Remove and Sort Usings on save features.
We apparently solved this issue with the extension VSE-FormatDocumentOnSave - by setting Edit.FormatDocument Edit.RemoveAndSort in the Commands option. It seems to work great but our concern is the fact that this is not a Microsoft tool and who knows what will happen in the future.
So, since the code style and formatting rules are a concern for every team out there, I would like to know if anyone knows a better way to manage this, considering that we are a team of 20+ developers.
Starting from VS2022-Preview2, there is no need to additional extension to "format on-save", you just run a customized code cleanup that contains "Format document" action on-save:
Customize your cleanup profile to perform "Format document" action (if not already there), in Analyze > Code Cleanup > Configure Code Cleanup
Enable "Run code cleanup profile on save" in VS configuration Tools > Options > Text Editor > Code Cleanup
Bringing Code Cleanup on Save To Visual Studio 2022 17.1 Preview 2
Unfortunately code cleanup setting is not included to .editorconfig file neither to exported config file .vssettings that could be shared across a team, maybe it will be included in the future.
Some feature requests related to this:
visual studio 2019 allow import and export Configure Code Cleanup profile
Provide a way to share Code Cleanup profiles as related to EditorConfig
Code Cleanup and EditorConfig
"Format Document On Save" worked for me.
Configuration:
Why not try the Code Cleanup On Save extension by Mads Kristensen (who works for Microsoft). I have not used it myself but all his other VS extensions are awesome.
Edit: The 'clean on save' feature has been added to Visual Studio 17.1 which is in preview at the moment. So no extensions required.
I find that in different cases you need to have different exception classes enabled/disabled in the Debug -> Exceptions dialog, and it's hard work to keep reconfiguring this.
So, is there any way to save the Debug -> Exception setting and restore them later?
I'd like to have a couple of different configurations to load depending on my needs.
I am aware that the settings are stored in SlnName.suo, but so are a lot of other stuff and it's a daunting and risky task to fiddle with it.
The question refers to Visual Studio 2010, but I'd be interested to know if the dialog has been improved in this respect in later versions of VS.
According to the following article:
https://faithlife.codes/blog/2010/01/saving_debug_exceptions_settings/
"These settings are stored in the SolutionName.suo file that lives alongside your .sln file. Once you’ve configured the Exceptions dialog to your liking, close all the open windows, then exit Visual Studio. Make a backup of the .suo file and restart Visual Studio. Whenever VS loses your settings, close it down, overwrite the real .suo file with your backup, restart VS, and you’re back to debugging the way you want to."
I am by no means a visual studio expert. However I have done some searching on this topic and cannot find anything to help me.
I'm working on a VS 2010 web application. We are using TFS 2012 for source control. I wouldn't be suprised if this is causing my issue so I make a special mention of it.
The issue I'm having is every morning after I open the project I have to go into Tools / Extension Manager and search online and add JScript Editor Extensions. When I open the project the next day it's gone and I have to add it again. (I think sometimes it does this right in the middle of coding - my Javascript window changes size and loses formatting)
An extension that stays every day regardless is NuGet package manager, so it's not removing every extension.
I suspect that when I get latest from TFS it's overwriting the solution or project which contains the reference to the extension but I haven't been able to verify this.
Can anyone tell me why extensions would be removed? Are these a local user setting or are they contained in the project file?
Taking a step back, my real problem is complete lack of integration between C# and Javascript in the web programming world. I need all the help I can get on the Javascript side.
There were a number of issues with buggy extension addins. To clarify are you using visual studio 2010 with tfs 2012 plugin?
The recommended process for identifying the buggy extension is to disable the extensions one at a time until the buggy one is isolated.
the source control shell for tfs2012 can be installed as a separate shell if needed.
I suspect the script editor extensions however.
Is there a way to tell Visual Studio 2005 to just ignore source control binding when opening a solution? I sometimes need to load a solution for which I don't have access to the source control server, but Visual Studio insists on trying to connect anyway, meaning I have to click "temporarily work offline in disconnected mode" for every project in the solution (of which there are about 20) as it loads. For some reason, it also tries to check each project out immediately after I've told it to work offline, so I have to click past that dialog box too.
As I will never need to edit anything in this solution, is there any way I can open it and have Visual Studio just ignore the fact it has source control bindings in it?
Edit: Ideally, I'd like a way to do this without having to change the project/solution files. They change fairly frequently, so I'd have to redo any changes every time there was a new version (otherwise I'd just unbind them once and it wouldn't be a problem).
Thanks for the replies so far.
The source control bindings are stored in Visual Studio solution file (.sln). For TFS for example, it contains a global section for TFS information and the solution projects added to TFS. You can edit the solution file to remove these bindings manually. I would suggest making a copy of the solution file first. However, I would recommend removing bindins via Visual Studio. Open your solution and go through the offline scenario. Then go to File/Source Control/Change Source Control (VS 2008) to bring up the UI that shows you the source control bindings in your solution. There you can manage the bindings including unbinding them. Once unbound, the next time you open the solution, VS should not have a need to access the source control.
I've been looking for a way to disable Integration between SourceSafe 2005 and Visual Studio 2008. We are forced to use SourceSafe being in a corporate environment and all. SourceSafe is fine on its own if you treat it like a baby. As soon as you try to do anything approaching useful it starts to break. God forbid you try to use the integration with Visual Studio. Being that I didn't want the "Bindings removed" so that it doesn't confuse other devs on the team I needed to be able to tell Studio to ignore the solution and project bindings and continue on it's merry way.
I followed the registry hack suggested in the following post
Removing SourceSafe Integration from Visual Studio 6
Studio did what I wanted...sort of. It removed the SourceSafe integration. However when I opened up a source controlled solution it asked me if I wanted to remove the bindings.
"the projects will be treated as not under source control"
No I don't want you to remove the bindings from the files, I want you to IGNORE them. This dialog pops up every time you open the solution/project file and there is no way around it.
My solution at the moment seems to have worked...for now.
File->Source Control->Change Source Control...->Disconnect
I hope this helps anyone else in the position of having to use SourceSafe but can't remove the bindings from the files themselves. WHY, Microsoft, WHY would you put the bindings in the files themselves?
/rant
I have this problem where I open Visual Studio and the internal windows are scattered all over the place. None of them are docked; some that should be visible have become invisible and vice versa. I then have to spend ages getting the windows back where I like them.
It only seems to happen with some solutions and only appeared recently.
For the life of me I can't fix the problem. Has anyone else been through this?
Sounds like there is definitely a problem with Visual Studio retaining your settings between round-trips and possibly your Visual Studio settings profile in general.
The solution I'd recommend is firstly to reset all settings, secondly customize things to your personal preference and finally take a backup of those customized settings. The idea is that this settings backup file can be used later to automate a quick settings restore to a point you are happy with. The following steps show how to do this and hopefully should sort out even the most confused Visual Studio setting issues:
Close down all instances of Visual Studio.
Go to Start > Programs > Visual Studio 200X > Visual Studio Tools > and choose 'Visual Studio 200X Command Prompt'
Run the sligthly less well known 'devenv.exe /ResetUserData' command. With this command you will lose all of your Visual Studio environment settings and customizations. Because of this, the /ResetUserData switch is not officially supported and Microsoft does not advertise it (the switch is not described in the help for devenv.exe you get when you type devenv.exe /? in a command prompt). Importantly, wait for the resulting devenv.exe process to disappear from Task Manager or even better Process Explorer.
When the process disappears from Task Manager or Process Explorer, run 'devenv.exe /ResetSettings' which will restore the IDE's default settings and eventually start a single instance of Visual Studio.
Now in Visual Studio choose 'Import and Export Settings...' near the bottom of the 'Tools' menu to start the Import and Export Settings Wizard.
Choose 'Reset all settings' radio button and Next > Choose 'No, just reset settings, overwriting my current settings' and Next > Choose your personal 'Settings Collection' preference, I would choose Visual C# Development Settings here (Note: What you choose here has an effect on keyboard shortcuts etc. but you can always repeat this process until happy) and click Finish.
When you get the message that 'Your settings were successfully reset to XXXXXX Development Settings.' click Close then spend a good bit of time adding any personal customizations to Visual Studio such as opening windows you always want open, customizing toolbars and adding any toolbar buttons etc.
When you are finished with your personal customization and completely happy with your setup go again to Tools > 'Import and Export Settings...'
Choose 'Export selected environment settings' radio button and Next > Tick 'All Settings' and Next > Choose a file name and directory and click Finish to store a backup of your current settings in a .vssettings file.
In future if things go haywire again head back to Tools > 'Import and Export Settings...' and this time choose 'Import selected environment settings' radio button and Next > Choose 'No, just import new settings, overwriting my current settings' and Next > Either choose the name of your .vssettings file from the list (usually under the My Settings folder) or Browse.. to where you saved the file and Next > Tick 'All Settings' and click Finish.
Importantly, close the single instance of Visual Studio. Any future instance you open should retain your latest customizations.
Visual Studio corrupts its settings with regular monotony (always has done, I've been suffering from this since the Visual C++ days, and it's still a bugbear in VS2013).
Often this seems to be totally at random, but it's highly probable after a crash.
It will also lose any changes to your settings if Visual Studio doesn't shut down cleanly - for some reason instead of saving back the settings when you OK the dialog, VS seems to wait until it quits to write back your changes, so after changing options I always quit and restart to ensure the changes have been flushed to disk. Similarly you should never change options with 2 or more instances of VS running, as the last one to quit will overwrite the settings.
In particular, there is an easily reproducible case: If you launch two or more copies at the same time (by which I mean if you start up two or more copies, so they are all initialising at the same time), they seem to fight over the settings file and it becomes corrupted or resets to defaults.
The best two workarounds I've found are:
Never launch more than one instance at a time. If you need to run several instances concurrently, then wait for the first one to finish loading its Solution before you start to launch the next.
Always use Tools > Import and Export Settings to save your settings to a backup file, so that recovering from this corruption only takes a few seconds each time it happens.
Another smaller, but still rather irritating habit is that if VS is minimised when it is quit (e.g. by shutting down), it corrupts its window position information and the next time you run it, it will be maximised.
I had a similar issue when the My Documents folder was stored on a mapped drive. If I opened VS before mapping the drive, VS would act as if it was the first time it had been opened. I solved this issue by storing the environment settings on the local disk.
I just ran into this problem too (seemed to trigger after a windows update) where I kept getting some bogus window layout no matter what I did. The above suggestions didn't work either. But luckily the suggestions in: Why doesn't VS 2008 IDE remember my preferences? of deleting:
%APPDATA%\Application Data\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\windows.prf
worked.
TP
Actually I worked out what the culprit was: previous VS crashes.
If one of my Visual Studio instances crashes for whatever reason - the next time I start up VS, I get a weird batch of settings. The behaviour depends on various factors, like whether or not I had other instances of VS open at the time.
I tried Peter McG's solution, still didn't help.
What ended up working for me was to delete my VS Solution User Options (.sou). Located in the same directory as my solution.
Only bad thing is you have to redo all of your settings. This included my exception changes. Not to much to change, but if you have a lot of customization it could be a real pain.
There must be something in that file messing everything up, but deleting the whole file is quick and easy.
Which solution you're opening shouldn't matter because those settings are not solution-specific. But I wonder do you maybe have Visual Studio 2005 and 2008 installed? If so, opening a solution created in 2005 will open VS 2005 and opening a 2008 solution will open VS 2008. You may have VS 2005 even if you didn't install it. For example, InfoPath 2007 installs a VS 2005 shell.
First I would position the windows where you want them, then do a Tools -> Export Settings and include only the window layouts. That way you at least have something you can revert to.
Then I would check Tools -> Options -> Import Export Settings and make note of where the "Automatically Save My Settings To This File" path is set to. Keep an eye on that file. Do you have any sync software that may be inadvertently overwriting it? Does it point to a non-existing location?
My issue is similar, but the result is the app crashes. The problem was this value
In HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\11.0\MainWindow. It was set to "0 1000 -280 -100 3" probably due to having multiple screens and moving the UI around a lot.
Deleting this value allowed the app to restart successfully. It gets recreated on startup.
I'm facing similar issue. And it also only started recently, like, within the last 30 days or so. The only thing I remember changing in this period was updating Resharper 4.5.
I have experienced something similar. In my case the text editor colors (c# editor for example) are going haywire. The only solution that I tried and works for me is change color theme so something else and then back to what I want.
In my case its not the Window layout being corrupted but Intellisense offering code completion and pop-up help. Never had this issue for the last decade, now it happens 3 times a day at least. Win8.1, Visual Studio 2013, ReSharper 8 and now ReSharper 9 (in hopes the upgrade would fix it).
I now routinely have to
close the solution,
Tools/Import-Export Settings/Reset all settings
Close Visual Studio
Open Visual Studio Import my saved settings
RE-open the solution and continue working
I can then work fine again for quite some time until something goes awry... lets say a stack-overflow while I'm debugging. At that point I just know my settings are screwed and my Intellisense is dead again.
I'm starting to wonder if it isn't something to do with a latest Visual Studio update. There are things in there I never use like the advertising crap and Office development integration. MS Office has its own issues, like Office 64 bit not being seen by any other application such as Quicken as an installed email program. Or maybe its a conflict with ReSharper which wants to overtake and 'extend' the Intellisense feature.
Either way, I'm sure its a different manifestation of the same issue: Visual Studio settings are going sideways during normal use.
I just came across this issue in VS 2012, reset window layout was doing nothing.
I extrapolated
%APPDATA%\Application Data\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\windows.prf
to
%appdata%\Microsoft\VisualStudio\11.0\Windows.index
... deleted it and was back in business!
Make sure you close all instances of VS first!