Save Your Visual Studio Settings in the Cloud

It has always been a tedious job to set up your Visual Studio settings when you change machines or companies, create a new Virtual Machine with Visual Studio to test something, or reinstall your Visual Studio. Now, using the Visual Studio Setting in the Cloud feature of Telerik JustCode you can synchronize your Visual Studio settings between every machine with Visual Studio and JustCode installed.

By using this feature you’ll be able to:

• Save and download all or a selection of your Visual Studio settings
• Create and store a Visual Studio settings backup in the cloud and restore as needed
• Automatically download your Visual Studio settings whenever they are changed
• Keep different sets of settings for different versions of Visual Studio
• Save and sync extension settings kept in Visual Studio’s settings

You can initially setup the JustCode cloud feature from the Getting Started Dialog; just go to the third page and enter your Telerik user credentials. From this screen, you also have the option to enable the “Automatic download of VS settings” feature.

JustCode Cloud Features

Manually save VS settings in the cloud

If you are not a fan of tools doing things automatically and taking control away from you, you will love the manual cloud sync feature provided by JustCode. To use this feature, go to “Options -> Cloud Sync” and press the “Upload VS Settings” button.

 

A dialog is displayed allowing you to choose which Visual Studio settings to save in the cloud. 

Finally, press the “OK” button to save your changes.

The next time you manually save your Visual Studio Settings in the cloud, JustCode displays the “JC Cloud Upload” dialog with your previous preferences already selected.

 

Manually download VS settings from the cloud

You can also manually download your Visual Studio cloud settings. To do this, press the “Download VS Settings” button from the “Cloud Sync” page.

In the displayed dialog, select the settings you want to download.

Automatically download VS settings from the cloud

If you want to use the same Visual Studio settings on every machine and do not want to manually download the cloud settings every time they are changed, you will find the “Enable automatic download if cloud settings are changed” option of JustCode extremely useful. All you need to do is to enable it from the “Cloud Sync” page.

From now on, when you manually upload new Visual Studio settings to the cloud, JustCode will automatically download them the next time Visual Studio loads on your other machines, saving you a lot of tedious work.

 

This process is different from JustCode settings, which allows for automatic synchronization. The current version of the Visual Studio API does not allow the detection of Visual Studio settings changes. We considered a few scenarios to make this feature similar to the automatic sync feature, and we settled on requiring the manual uploading of Visual Studio settings. We may enable automatic synchronization of Visual Studio settings in the future when the Visual Studio API is updated to support this scenario.

Do you think this is the best solution? I created an item in the JustCode Feedback Portal that you can vote for or against. Please leave your suggestion if you prefer a different approach.

Keep different sets of settings for different versions of VS

You may run different versions of Visual Studio in different locations. For example, you may work in Visual Studio 2012 at home on your Win8 machine but must use VS2008 at work. In both cases, you have several instances running across several machines, and you would like to keep your settings synchronized, even if each version of Visual Studio has different settings. Here is what JustCode provides to help with this:

1. You make setting changes on your work machines using VS2008. All of your settings are kept in sync between instances of VS2008 on the same machine and across different machines. Those settings do not affect your VS2012 settings at home.
2. You change setting on your home machines using VS2012. All of your settings are kept in sync between instances of VS2012 on the same machine and across different machines. These settings do not affect your VS2008 settings at work. 

Long story short – you are provided with a different set of cloud settings for each major version of Visual Studio and these sets do not affect each other.

 

Backup settings

You may have Visual Studio set up perfectly, but there are times when changes may be required. Perhaps someone has shown you settings you find preferable, or perhaps different settings are required for different solutions. Of course, you may not want to keep these changes. To accommodate this need, JustCode provides the “Cloud backup settings” feature.

To create a backup, go to “Options -> Cloud Sync -> Cloud Backup Settings” and enter a name for the new backup. Then press the “Create” button.

Select which settings to backup in the resulting dialog.

As a cloud backup, it will be available on all your machines, and you can restore the backup on any one of them.

To restore a backup, go to “Cloud Backup Settings” and select a backup. Press “Restore,” and select which settings to restore in the resulting dialog.

Sync extension settings between machines

The JustCode cloud feature not only synchronizes Visual Studio settings, it also synchronizes extensions settings that are stored in the Visual Studio settings file. JustCode makes it as easy to share your extensions settings across many machines as it does Visual Studio settings.

Summary

The JustCode cloud features allow you to synchronize your JustCode and Visual Studio settings across all of your machines. This eliminates the tedious task of exporting a Visual Studio settings file on one machine and then importing it on another. You can also create backup settings, allowing you to change settings between solutions with ease.

JustCode makes development faster, easier, and more efficient. If you still have not tried JustCode, what are you waiting for? Download the 30-day free trial today!

Happy coding!