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State Persistence and the Visual Studio IDE

The Import/Export Settings command on the Tools menu of the integrated development environment (IDE) imports and exports customizations of the Visual Studio environment. The Visual Studio settings APIs in the Visual Studio SDK enable a VSPackage to define one or more settings categories (groups of state variables) to be persisted when a user chooses the Import/Export Settings command.

A GUID uniquely identifies each settings category and is defined in its own registry entry, referred to as a Custom Settings Point.

Note

The standard implementations of the Tools Options pages, the Toolbox, and the Microsoft.VisualStudio.Shell.DialogPage automatically provide support for persistence. The settings API can override the default mechanism. For more information, see Toolbox (Visual Studio SDK), Options Pages, and DialogPage.

In This Section

  • Visual Studio Settings
    Describes how to manage the export/import sections of the IDE.

  • Options Pages
    Describes the support that the Visual Studio SDK automatically provides for managing existing or creating new Tools Options pages.

  • Toolbox (Visual Studio SDK)
    Explains the support that the Visual Studio SDK automatically provides for managing or extending the Toolbox.

  • User Settings and Options
    Describes how to program your VSPackage to obtain and preserve user preferences.