Save settings in VS without quitting

Question

I very rarely close down Visual Studio intentionally. The project I'm working on is so ginormous that it takes about 15 minutes just to load it up, so it's been my practice just to leave the solution open overnight so that it'll be ready for me the next morning. The only time I have to restart the program now is if it crashes - which - happens. Every once in a while I'll do something it doesn't like and it quits on me. I accept this. I'd love for it to be bullet-proof, but I hardly expect that.

The downside of this is that apparently, any settings you change in the program while it's running (fonts and colors, keyboard shortcuts, auto-formatting settings, basically anything in the Tools/Options dialogue) are only saved when you quit the program legitimately. These settings are not saved when it crashes. So I find myself having to redo any settings changes I made every single time.

First off - why the heck doesn't it save the settings when you change the settings? How hard would that be? It's a certain level of hubris to take it on faith that your program will always close normally and not bother saving state until the shutdown process. (And not having it save settings in an abnormal shutdown process either) I'd get fired (or at least reprimanded) for writing code that did that, so how does Microsoft get away with it? And is there some way of forcing it to save settings without quitting and reloading?

Answer 1

As far as I know, the only thing you can do in your situation is to export your settings directly after you change them, and import them after a crash. This way your settings are safe, and you don't need to restart.