SettingsManager.GetWritableSettingsStore available for import/export in Visual Studio Extension?

Question

I'm using the SettingsManager in my Visual Studio extension to store user settings.

SettingsManager settingsManager = new ShellSettingsManager(ServiceProvider.GlobalProvider);
var store = settingsManager.GetWritableSettingsStore(SettingsScope.UserSettings);

I have a custom WPF Options page, as described in this post. I'd also like to set my extension up to work with the Import/Export settings, so I followed the Creating an Options Page and Creating a Settings Category pages, to add this to my package attributes:

[ProvideProfile(typeof(OptionsDialogPage), "Unit Test Boilerplate Generator", "Unit Test Boilerplate Generator Settings", 106, 107, true, DescriptionResourceID = 108)]
[ProvideOptionPage(typeof(OptionsDialogPage), "Unit Test Boilerplate Generator", "Templates", 101, 109, supportsAutomation: true)]

I successfully got it to appear as a heading under Import/Export settings, but none of my data stored with the SettingsManager shows up after the export. I was looking over the options under ProvideProfile and ProvideOptionPage and tried setting SupportsProfiles = true but that didn't help.

How do I hook the two of these systems up?

(edit) I ran Process Monitor and found the SettingsManager keys here (CollectionPath UnitTestBoilerplateGenerator):

\REGISTRY\A\{08894cfc-f3a9-f49b-133e-3453dfe7a27d}\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\15.0_a703f143Exp\UnitTestBoilerplateGenerator\Template_VisualStudio_Moq_File

And the built-in options stored here (example from another extension):

\REGISTRY\A\{22e40365-b8e3-e9b2-1315-55021a1e4c3d}\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\15.0_a703f143\ApplicationPrivateSettings\Xavalon\XamlStyler\Core\Options\StylerOptions\NoNewLineElement

So it seems like they get stored in separate areas. Is there any way to write programmatically to those built-in options or to include the custom CollectionPath in the import/export?

Answer 1

I found a way to do it. You need to write to a collection path corresponding to the full type name of your options dialog type. Mine was UnitTestBoilerplate.View.OptionsDialogPage so I used a collection path of ApplicationPrivateSettings\UnitTestBoilerplate\View\OptionsDialogPage . I also needed to make a dummy property on the options dialog type to fool VS into actually exporting the setting. So if I was writing to MyProperty I needed

public int MyProperty { get; set; }

on OptionsDialogPage.

However this seems like a huge hack that might break on a new version of VS. I'd love a more elegant solution if anyone has one.

Also one really odd caveat is that if you have "VisualStudio" in the key name for a string setting, it comes back as "1*null*" no matter what you add there.