Change location of VS Express 2013 "StartPages" folder

Question

Visual Studio Express 2013 for Windows Desktop puts a bunch of user-specific settings in C:\Users\MYUSER\Documents\Visual Studio 2013. I don't like this as it messes with my home directory structure, so I have used the Tools > Options dialog to move the majority of these options outside my Documents folder.

However, I cannot find a way to move the StartPages subdirectory, so C:\Users\MYUSER\Documents\Visual Studio 2013\StartPages gets re-created every time I start Visual Studio. Annoying!

Can someone help me figure out how to tell Visual Studio to use a different folder?

This is what I have tried so far:

• Look through Tools > Options, including the uniquely unhelpful Environment > Startup options page.
• This post, which relates to VS 2010.
• Use regedit to search for the following (in keys/values/data):
  • "My Documents\visual studio 2013\StartPages"
  • "Documents\visual studio 2013\StartPages"
  • "StartPages"
• Use Notepad++ to find-in-files for "StartPages" in %APPDATA%\Microsoft\WDExpress\12.0 (no results).

Answer 1

For Visual Studio Express 2013 for Windows Desktop (WDExpress 12), change the following registry key:

`HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\WDExpress\12.0\VisualStudioLocation`

Mine was originally set to "%USERPROFILE%\Documents\visual studio 2013". I fixed it by deleting "Documents\" and I was able to fix the sloppy lower-casing at the same time!

To the best of my knowledge, there's no way to set this value in the GUI, which I consider to be sloppy as hell, especially for a developer tool! So ignore the negative nancies like these ones who say it can't be done and regedit yourself back to sanity.