hello,

we are a school with 200+ virtual clients. the programming classes use the express editions of visual basic and visual web developer. the virtual clients are non-persistent, meaning that all userchanges are cleared if the machine is restarted.

this means that every time a user starts his ide, the machine is "configured for the first use".

is there any way around this behaviour?

thanks in advance,
abe

Hello,

Visual Studio will remember the user settings and store it in a CurrentSettings.vssettings file. When the next time Visual Studio is opened, if Visual Studio can find the CurrentSettings.vssettings file it last stored, it uses the found one. If it cannot, it will re-configure the settings and store the new default settings to the setting file.

Based on your description, theCurrentSettings.vssettings file is removed every time whenyour target machine is restart. To avoid this, we must specifya path where to store CurrentSettings.vssettings file and this path should be persistent.
"Click on the Tools > Options... Select "Import and Export Settings", and change the path under "Automatically save my settings to this file:" to a path that is NOT under the "My Documents" directory."

Ji Zhou

MSDN Subscriber Support in Forum

If you have any feedback on our support, please contact msdnmg@microsoft.com

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Hello,

Visual Studio will remember the user settings and store it in a CurrentSettings.vssettings file. When the next time Visual Studio is opened, if Visual Studio can find the CurrentSettings.vssettings file it last stored, it uses the found one. If it cannot, it will re-configure the settings and store the new default settings to the setting file.

Based on your description, theCurrentSettings.vssettings file is removed every time whenyour target machine is restart. To avoid this, we must specifya path where to store CurrentSettings.vssettings file and this path should be persistent.
"Click on the Tools > Options... Select "Import and Export Settings", and change the path under "Automatically save my settings to this file:" to a path that is NOT under the "My Documents" directory."

Ji Zhou

MSDN Subscriber Support in Forum

If you have any feedback on our support, please contact msdnmg@microsoft.com

---

Please remember to mark the replies as answers if they help and unmark them if they provide no help.

thanks for your reply.

this works fine for one user, but we have about 800 pupils.

can i define a fixed settings-path for all users (perhaps via gpo)?

abe

Hello,

Unfortunately, Visual Studio IDE settings file is client side concept. There is no group policy to control this. That is to say, for each client we have to set it respectively. I understand it is a pain to sucha thing manuallyfor 800 pcs. As a workaround, wehave to write some automatical vbscriptto do the following things,
1.Set HKCU\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\Profile\AutoSaveFile to the new persist path we want to store the vssettings file.
2.Move the settings file to the new path and delete the orignal settings file

But this requires some vbscript writing experience to do it.

So is it possible towrite an instruction to ask first student user whouses VS Express inthat machine to do manually settings in Visual Studio Express? That looks an alternative.

By the way, anotherbetter approach ischanging the gpo tomake the default vssettings file path as a persist folder that will not be cleaned byrestarting.

Ji Zhou

MSDN Subscriber Support in Forum

If you have any feedback on our support, please contact msdnmg@microsoft.com

---

Please remember to mark the replies as answers if they help and unmark them if they provide no help.

hi.

and sorry for not checking back.. other more important problems came up.
however, i'm stuck with the firstrun issue again.

..do the following things..
rewriting the registry per startup- or login-script doesn't work.
the settings path is updated, but the changes are not activated until the next reboot (at which time all changes are cleared again).

..do manually settings..
if the first user who uses vs express changes the path manually, it would be just for his own profile. also, the setting would get lost upon restart.

..changing the gpo to make the default vssettings file path..
yes, i want to, but i don't know how (see previous post). if possible, i would also like to get rid of the "customer experience improvement program".

thank you,
abe