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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.

Alan
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3 Answers3

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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.

Martin Meixger
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  • Thanks for checking this. To me it looks like a bug causing only minor annoyance, so no sweat, but still. I'll keep hunting. – Alan Oct 28 '08 at 14:22
  • OK, I accepted this now, in the knowledge that such customization will probably never again be enabled. – Alan Jul 08 '12 at 08:59
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If you just want to change the location of "my projects", you can set the path as described for VS in the answer to this post: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/vssetup/thread/861733cd-e337-4fce-9570-1a1d43cd64ac/

I have just done this for VS2005 and VS2008 and it works fine.

shindigo
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  • Thanks, but this is not really what I'm after. I'd like to have several places show up in the dialog. – Alan Jun 13 '11 at 08:10
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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
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    Could you include your actual reg file as an example? Mine's not working. [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\Open Find\Places\UserDefinedPlaces\Place0] "Path" = "C:\\Projects\\IONOnline" – Michael L Perry Mar 04 '10 at 17:41
  • Does not work for me either. I have just tried the same technique with VS2010 (10.0), and no custom places are displayed in the Open dialogs. Too bad... – Alan Jun 13 '11 at 08:12