Customizing the Development Environment

You can change the appearance and behavior of the Visual Studio integrated development environment (IDE) in many ways. Visual Studio includes several predefined settings combinations that you can apply to the IDE. In addition, you can customize items such as windows, toolbars, shortcut keys, and other UI elements, and save your customizations.

In This Section

• How to: Customize Dynamic Help
  Explains how to reduce the number of topic types and categories that appear in the Dynamic Help window.

• How to: Customize Toolbars (Visual Studio)
  Explains how to add toolbars and customize them.

• How to: Launch Tools from Visual Studio
  Explains how to add a command on the Tools menu to start other applications from Visual Studio.

• How to: Change the Item Displayed on Start Up of the Development Environment
  Explains how to specify that a particular dialog box, page, or empty environment is displayed when you start the IDE.

• Working with Settings
  Describes how settings work in the IDE, how to import and export settings, and how to change base settings.

• How to: Work with Shortcut Key Combinations
  Explains how to determine which keyboard shortcut is assigned to a command, how to create new shortcuts, and how to import or export your custom shortcuts.

• Options Dialog Box (Visual Studio)
  Describes the Options dialog box.

• Visual Studio External Tools
  Describes the various tools and utilities that are included with Visual Studio.

• Customizing the Start Page
  Describes how to change the source of news displayed on the Start Page, and also how to remove items from the Recent Projects list.

Related Sections

• Accessibility Features of Visual Studio
  Explains how to create shortcut key combinations, optimize window layouts, change the font and color of text, and customize the IDE in other ways.

• Customizing the Editor
  Explains how to change the appearance of the editor and the text it displays, and how to create editor shortcuts.

• How to: Specify Debugger Settings
  Shows how to use the Options and Project Settings dialog boxes to change various settings for the debugger and debugging.

• How to: Create and Edit Configurations
  Explains how to specify a variety of build configurations for your development effort.

• Customizing and Automating the Development Environment
  Explains how to create add-ins and customize the appearance and behavior of the IDE.