Wednesday, June 20, 2012

How to restore/reset lost Visual Studio 2005 menu items

For some strange reason, installation of various add-ins and add-ons for Visual Studio 2005 causes it to reset its menus - and possibly other settings. 
But they don't get reset to installation defaults: rather, Visual Studio goes into some kind of minimalistic state where you don't get a "Macros" item in the "Tools" menu anymore, the "Attach To Process" and "Exceptions" commands get lost etc. 
At first I resorted to going into the Customize dialog and bringing back the items each time (although I never was quite able to figure out how to correctly get back the "Build [project name]" item: occasionally it either appears twice or disappears).
 I did so much installing/reinstalling of various CTP's that eventually I gave up on customization and started using keyboard shortcuts instead of menus. Now, finally, 


I found out that there actually is a simple way to reset settings to "normal" instead of "obscure" (seems I hit the right magic word with Google: my searches for "reset Visual Studio 2005 menu" and such led nowhere, but once I asked it how to restore the Macros menu, I struck gold :)). 




The solution is as follows: go to Tools -> Import and Export Settings and choose Reset all settings

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