If you've ever used Visual Studio and you've ever ventured onto the Tools.Options dialog, you've discovered the dizzying array of customizable settings offered by the IDE. You've also undoubtably discovered (possibly by accident) that the positions of the IDE's tool windows are fully customizable. And you may have discovered that, like Office, the menus and toolbars of VS are fully customizable. In fact, VS is so customizable that you can easily spend many hours customizing the IDE to make it look and behave the optimal way for your individual work style. For multiple versions now, customers have requested some way of capturing all this work they've done in setting up the IDE, so they can quickly and easily recreate their personal settings at a later time or on another machine. I'm happy to say that we'll be providing a feature in VS Whidbey to enable this scenario.

The Import/Export Settings dialog/wizard will be available from the Tools menu in VS. It allows you to choose categories of settings to export to a .vssettings file, and it allows you to point to an existing .vsettings file and choose categories of settings to import from that file. So what is a settings 'category'? In general, a category of settings is a logical grouping of settings for a toolwindow, a tools.options page, or an IDE feature.