Share the same Visual Studio Settings between Team Members

If you have customized your VS 2008/2010 environment with a new font size , color, theme etc. and now want to share these settings with other team members on your network to maintain consistency, then Visual Studio allows you to create a single .vssettings file and share it with your team members.

Here are the steps to do so:

Open Visual Studio 2010 > Go to Tools > Options > Environment > Import and Export Settings. Save the file to a local folder or a UNC share. I have called the file VSCsharpSettings.vssettings

Importing the Settings

Now to apply these settings to a workgroup, go to a workgroup machine, open Visual Studio 2010 > Go to Tools > Options > Environment > Import and Export Settings > Check the checkbox saying use team settings file and enter the path where the original VSCsharpSettings.vssettings file was saved (UNC or local path) and click Ok. You will now see that all the IDE’s on the workgroup that imported this setting file have the new settings applied.

image

In future, whenever you update this setting file, all the other IDE’s on the workgroup that are using this settings file will automatically use the updated category specified in the .vssettings file.

Note: The settings file imported through the Team Settings File option allows developers to keep the customizations they have made to the IDE. It only overrides the category specified in the .vssettings file.






About The Author

Suprotim Agarwal
Suprotim Agarwal, Developer Technologies MVP (Microsoft Most Valuable Professional) is the founder and contributor for DevCurry, DotNetCurry and SQLServerCurry. He is the Chief Editor of a Developer Magazine called DNC Magazine. He has also authored two Books - 51 Recipes using jQuery with ASP.NET Controls. and The Absolutely Awesome jQuery CookBook.

Follow him on twitter @suprotimagarwal.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Is there a way to set this per solution?

I mean frankly this is kind of lame. It's assuming that we're only working on one team per machine. I have multiple OSS projects that I work on an each one has different required settings (specifically with regards to tabs vs. spaces). I would really like if this value was set per solution (or maybe even per project) instead of globally.

A weakness in VS...