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Start external program

To debug a Visual Studio Addin I configured the Addin project to start a new instance of Visual Studio when I run the addin inside VS.

  • Open the project properties
  • Go to the Debug tab.
  • In the Start Action part, select the Start external program option and browse to devenv.exe.

After checking my code into Team Foundation Server, I noticed that another developer had to reconfigure this setting. The reason is that this setting goes into your user options file.

I got bored having to re-set this value again and again. So I searched for a solution.  Turns out that this setting goes to a file named after your project file plus the ".user" extension. This file is just a fragment of an MSBuild file, and would look something like:

   1:  <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> 
   2:  <Project ToolsVersion="4.0" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003"> 
   3:     <PropertyGroup Condition="'$(Configuration)|$(Platform)' == 'Debug|AnyCPU'"> 
   4:        <StartAction>Program</StartAction> 
   5:        <StartProgram>C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common\IDE\devenv.exe</StartProgram> 
   6:        <StartArguments>/rootSuffix Exp</StartArguments> 
   7:     </PropertyGroup> 
   8:  </Project>


So what you can do is copy the entire PropertyGroup to your main project file, delete this .user, and check-in your change.

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