Visual Studio 2005 Settings Trick

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When you start Visual Studio 2005 for the first time after installation, you will see the following dialog:

Several people have been asking me about how they can bypass the Choose Your Environment Settings dialog when they first start up Visual Studio. There are a couple of reasons why you may want to do this.

  1. First, you may be deploying Visual Studio do a group of users whom you know should be using a particular settings file (or a custom settings file).
  2. Second, you may be an ISV who is shipping your Visual Studio extension based on the Premier Partner Edition of Visual Studio, and you always want your users to apply a certain set of settings. If you don't know what the Premier Partner Edition is, see the section What is Premier Partner Edition below?

Set Default Settings File to Use 

Either way, you can easily accomplish this by setting the following registry key value:

  1. Under HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0\Profile\, add the key value name "DefaultVsProfile"
  2. The key value should be of type string and set the value to 'foo', where foo.vssettings is the name of the default settings file to use, which lives under C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE\Profiles\

When this key is set properly, Visual Studio 2005 will not show the Choose Your Environment Settings dialog when it launches.

What is Premier Partner Edition?

The Premier Partner Edition (aka PPE) of Visual Studio is another edition of Visual Studio like Standard, Professional and Visual Studio Team System Architect Edition. The PPE is actually the edition that contains the *least* amount of functionality and you can think of it as the empty Visual Studio shell. We don't ship this edition of Visual Studio to our end-users. Instead, some of the premier partners in our Visual Studio Industry Partner (VSIP) program license this edition so that they can package their products and ship the PPE together with their products to their end customers. The benefit is that Visual Studio is no longer a pre-requisite for their customers, since it is already included. This is ideal for ISVs who integrate their own languages inside Visual Studio. The Intel Visual Fortran and Intel C++ Compiler, for example, use the PPE edition of Visual Studio.