save visual studio state

Question

Is there any way to save the "state" of VS 2008 (i.e. open windows, breakpoints, bookmarks, etc.) without closing it? The pain point I'm facing is that VS 2008 crashes on me on a fairly frequent basis (every few days) and when I bring it up I've lost all my "state". Save All does not do this... it just saves file contents.

Answer 1

I'm not sure how much of this information will be saved but Tools Import / Exports settings will save a great deal of state in visual studio if you export everything. It's not a quick button click process though so it may be a bit heavy weight for what you're looking for.

Answer 2

Tools->Import/Export will only save the environment settings (font colors, window layout, etc).

What you should look at is Tools->Options->Environment->AutoRecover

This won't give you a button to push to save your "state" but it should do everything you were looking for automatically.

When studio crashes, usually the autorecover wizard should pop up when you restart it.

If not, the files are backed up in ...\My Documents\Visual Studio \Backup Files\.

Answer 3

Here is what i do and it seems to work for me,

• Open a single instance of visual studio.
• Set all the window positions as you would want them.
• Close visual studio.
• From now any instance you open should follow those settings.

It get a bit messy when you have multiple windows open and change some settings on one of them and other setting on the other one. the key is to have a single window open when you are making your personalization and close it as soon as you are done.

Answer 4

Any chance you have your solution.suo or project.csproj.user files under version control?

Both of these file types should not be version controlled, e.g. in Subversion you would set svn:ignore property for *.suo and *.user file types in the directory they belong to.

I believe they hold your workspace state info.