What to do when Visual Studio starts behaving weird? Sometimes it happens that Visual Studio stop displaying the Toolbox, Server Explorer or even the Properties, it's not really common but still happens quite a lot, specially if you're running Windows Vista. The quick answer to that is to restore Visual Studio Settings. Crashing might not be the only reason to restore. Maybe you just didn't configure it properly and want to go back to the original settings. Here's how you work with Visual Studio Settings.
Restore Default Settings
To restore Visual Studio defalt settings:
The Picture 1 shows the path.
It will open the command prompt, and all you have to do is type:
>devenv /ResetSettings
It will Restore the IDE's default settings. The next time you open Visual Studio, it will behave just like a fresh installation, which means all your configs are gone. The ones you wanted to remove and the ones you wanted to keep. You'll have to edit your IDE again to make it look like what it was before you reseted the settigns.
Saving Your Custom Settings
To save your custom settings, click on Tools > Options; on the tree view, select "Environment Options" and click on the node "Import and Export Settings" as shown on the Pircure 2. There you can see where the settings for Visual Studio are being saved. You can change the path, so it saves somewhere else. Alternatively or go directly to the path and create a copy of the file, then paste it somewhere else. This way you'll have a separate copy of your custom settings.
Loading Saved Settings
Once you have your settings saved, you can restore it to any Visual Studio. To do so, run the same command you did to reset the settings, but this time passing the path to your saved settings file:
>Devenv /ResetSettings "C:\MyFolder\MySettings.settings"
This command will open a new instance of Visual Studio with the settings stored on the given file.
"The End"