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.

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.

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