How to Disable Start Page After Solution Close in Visual Studio 2017

Question

In Visual Studio 2017, you can select Tools > Options > Environment > Startup > At startup: Show empty environment. This prevents the Start Page from displaying when you launch Visual Studio, and in previous versions it prevented the Start Page from appearing when closing a solution.

In Visual Studio 2017, though, it seems the designers chose to show the Start Page after closing a solution, even if the option was for an empty environment on startup.

Are there any creative ways to get around this until the Visual Studio team decides to provide a reasonable option?

Answer 1

I came across this after running into the same thing. Here is a potential work around from the developer community page from Oleg Savelyev & Bill Menees answers. Work around later added on that page by Praveen Sethuraman.

Here's a workaround you can use to disable the Start Page from reopening after a solution closes.

The steps to follow are:

1.Close all instances of VS & Run Regedit

2.Select HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE

3.File -> Load Hive…

4.Open %LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\VisualStudio\15.0_\privateregistry.bin

5.Enter a name like “MyVSHive”

6.Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\MyVSHive\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\15.0_\StartPage

7.Create a new dword with a non-zero value like so:

"DisableOpenOnCloseSolution"=dword:00000001

8.Select “MyVSHive” and then go to File->Unload Hive…

9.Restart VS

Now, on closing a solution, the Start Page will not autopen.

Please note that resetting your settings will cause this setting to be reset and you will have to run through these steps again.

Thanks,

Praveen [MSFT]

Worked for me. Copying over in case it helps someone else.

Answer 2

I disliked this behavior so much that I added an "Auto-close Start Page" option to my free Menees VS Tools 2017 extension for VS 2017. It defaults to false (since I didn't want to change VS's default behavior for everyone using my extension), but I set it to true manually on all my VS installs.

I and others discussed this with Andrew Arnott from Microsoft on the MS Developer Community, but he didn't seem to care much. MS telemetry data says that those of us that don't want to see the Start Page are in the minority, so MS is just going to force it on us now. :-(