Why doesn't visual studio register environment variables set using windows explorer?

Question

Hi,

Newly created environment variables are not passed on to visual studio sometimes. What may be the problem? The environment variables are not visible to VS even when I close and restart it. This is an intermittent problem and thus hard to diagnose.

Answer 1

Environment variables are passed on to child processes from their parent process so if you used explorer to change the environment variables and also launch visual studio then the environment vars should be visible to VS.

But if you are using a third party application launcher (like launchy) then the changes may not be propagated if the launcher does not receive and act on the windows WM_SETTINGSCHANGED event.

So you may try one of the following...

1. Launch VS from explorer
2. Restart the app launcher and launch VS from it.