Customizing the Places Bar in Visual Studio 2008

Question

Has anybody succeeded in customizing the Places Bar for VS 2008? My customizations from VS 2005 did not transfer to 2008 (obviously), and no matter what I do with the registry, I cannot make my custom places appear on the Open dialogs. I have read and applied the relevant MS KB article, to no avail.

This used to work fine with VS 2005, so it may well be a VS 2008 bug, but I may be wrong trying the same approach.

Answer 1

some observations:

VS2008 uses now Common File Dialog. With Powertoys TweakUK i was able to set all places to 'none' and the VS2008 'Open File' dialog becomes empty.

Unfortunately VS2008 ignores user defined places or directories, and shows instead the default places: 'Desktop', 'standard_project_folder', 'My Computer'.

With Sysinternals RegMon i see that Registry Key [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\comdlg32\PlacesBar] gets read on ctrl+o...altough the places defined in here are still being ignored.

Answer 2

VS2005 and VS2008 (sp1 anyway) both still use the following registry Key structure

So, for vs2008, create these reg paths.

HKCU/Software/Microsoft/VisualStudio/9.0/Open Find/Places/UserDefinedPlaces/Place0/Path = (some path

HKCU/Software/Microsoft/VisualStudio/9.0/Open Find/Places/UserDefinedPlaces/Place1/Path = (another path)

VS2008 Example:

HKCU/Software/Microsoft/VisualStudio/9.0/Open Find/Places/UserDefinedPlaces/Place0/Path = "C:\Dev"

HKCU/Software/Microsoft/VisualStudio/9.0/Open Find/Places/UserDefinedPlaces/Place1/Path = "C:\Staging"

Important Notes:

• It appears you must restart visual studio each time you edit these keys
• VS2005 = 8.0 / VS2008 = 9.0
• Path is a String Value (REG_SZ) containing the path to be added to the places bar
• Desktop and My Computer seem to be predefined and always present?
• I don't know whether you can have more than 5 places max like (the Common dialog)
• Suggest creating a simple .REG file that can be edited and clicked to alter these