User Settings and Options

Visual Studio 2013

Other Versions

A VSPackage has several tools that enable it to obtain and preserve user preferences.

VSPackages can modify existing or create new Options dialog boxes under the Tools menu (Tools Options pages) by using the Visual Studio SDK and the Visual Studio automation model. In addition, the integrated development environment (IDE) supports automatic persistence of user preferences on Tools Options pages.
Visual Studio Settings provides a generic mechanism to support the persistence of IDE configurations regardless of how they are set. Through the IDE, users can save their current Visual Studio environment configuration, retrieve a saved configuration, or move the settings to different computers.

For more information, see Working with Settings.
The managed package framework provides a mechanism for building configuration dialog boxes that persist settings by using the Microsoft.VisualStudio.Shell::DialogPage class.

In This Section

Using Options Pages: Outlines how to support or modify Options pages.
State Persistence and the Visual Studio IDE: Describes the most general mechanism in the Visual Studio SDK for persisting user settings.

Contributing to the Automation Model: Provides a detailed view of the automation model and discusses the ways to provide automation for your VSPackage. Also provides code examples that show how an automation consumer obtains the initial project automation objects.
Working with Settings: Discusses how settings work in the IDE, importing and exporting settings, and changing base settings.
Controlling Options Settings: Describes changing the settings in the Options dialog box on the Tools menu.
User Interfaces: Explains how to use Visual Studio services to create UI elements that match the rest of Visual Studio.