Support for User Settings

Applies to: Visual Studio Visual Studio for Mac

Note

This article applies to Visual Studio 2017. If you're looking for the latest Visual Studio documentation, see Visual Studio documentation. We recommend upgrading to the latest version of Visual Studio. Download it here

A VSPackage may define one or more settings categories, which are groups of state variables that persist when a user chooses the Import/Export Settings command on the Tools menu. To enable this persistence, you use the settings APIs in the Visual Studio SDK.

A registry entry that is referred to as a Custom Settings Point and a GUID defines a VSPackage's settings category. A VSPackage can support multiple settings categories, each defined by a Custom Settings Point.

• Implementations of settings that are based on interop assemblies (using the IVsUserSettings interface) should create Custom Settings Point by either editing the registry or using a Registrar script (.rgs file). For more information, see Creating Registrar Scripts.

• Code that uses the Managed Package Framework (MPF) should create Custom Settings Points by attaching a ProvideProfileAttribute to the VSPackage for each Custom Settings Point.

  If a single VSPackage supports several Custom Settings Points, each Custom Settings Point is implemented by a separate class, and each is registered by a unique instance of the ProvideProfileAttribute class. Consequently, a settings implementing class can support more than one settings category.

Custom Settings Point Registry Entry Details

Custom Settings Points are created in a registry entry in the following location: HKLM\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\<Version>\UserSettings\<CSPName>, where <CSPName> is the name of the Custom Settings Point the VSPackage supports and <Version> is the version of Visual Studio, for example 8.0.

Note

The root path of HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\<Version> can be overridden with an alternate root when the Visual Studio integrated development environment (IDE) is initialized. For more information, see Command-Line Switches.

The structure of the registry entry is illustrated below:

HKLM\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\<Version>\UserSettings\

<CSPName>= s '#12345'

Package = '{XXXXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXXXXXXX}'

Category = '{YYYYYY YYYY YYYY YYYY YYYYYYYYY}'

ResourcePackage = '{ZZZZZZ ZZZZ ZZZZ ZZZZ ZZZZZZZZZ}'

AlternateParent = CategoryName

Name	Type	Data	Description
(Default)	REG_SZ	Name of the Custom Settings Point	The key's name, <CSPName>, is the unlocalized name of the Custom Settings Point. For implementations based on MPF, the key's name is obtained by combining the categoryName and objectName arguments of the ProvideProfileAttribute constructor into categoryName_objectName. The key can be empty, or it can contain the reference ID to the localized string in a satellite DLL. This value is obtained from the objectNameResourceID argument to the ProvideProfileAttribute constructor.
Package	REG_SZ	GUID	The GUID of the VSPackage that implements the Custom Settings Point. Implementations based on MPF using the ProvideProfileAttribute class, use the constructor's objectType argument containing the VSPackage's Type and reflection to obtain this value.
Category	REG_SZ	GUID	GUID identifying the settings category. For implementations based on interop assemblies, this value can be an arbitrarily chosen GUID, which the Visual Studio IDE passes to the ExportSettings and the ImportSettings methods. All implementations of these two methods should verify their GUID arguments. For implementations based on MPF, this GUID is obtained by the Type of the class implementing the Visual Studio settings mechanism.
ResourcePackage	REG_SZ	GUID	Optional. Path to satellite DLL containing localized strings if the implementing VSPackage does not supply them. MPF uses reflection to obtain the correct resource VSPackage, so the ProvideProfileAttribute class does not set this argument.
AlternateParent	REG_SZ	Name of the folder under the Tools Options page containing this Custom Settings Point.	Optional. You must set this value only if a settings implementation supports Tools Options pages that use the persistence mechanism in the Visual Studio SDK rather than the mechanism in the automation model to save state. In these cases, the value in the AlternateParent key is the topic section of the topic.sub-topic string used to identify the particular ToolsOptions page. For example, for the ToolsOptions page "TextEditor.Basic" the value of AlternateParent would be "TextEditor". When ProvideProfileAttribute generates the Custom Settings Point, it is the same as the category name.