Visual Studio 2013 always opens Properties window in Category sorting

Question

I am pretty sure that Microsoft changed something between Visual Studio 2010 - 2012/2013.

Whenever I open the Properties window for the first time in a Visual Studio 2013 instance, it defaults to the Category sorting rather than the Alphabetical sorting.

In 2010, I know that the sorting was stored and remembered in new instance of VS. If I used Alphabetical sorting before, it opened the Properties window in Alphabetical sorting.

In 2013 however, it always defaults to Category. This is really annoying as my eyes are unused to find Properties in the long list of a Windows.Forms control properties for example.

Can anyone reproduce this issue and may even have a fix for this?

Answer 1

Something is broken on your machine if this does not persist between VS sessions. Always hard to guess what that might be, you'll need to look for the reason that the current settings are not getting saved on your machine. There is one specific file that gets updated every time you exit VS, it records the value that you care about.

You'll find it in C:\Users\YourName\Documents\Visual Studio 2013\Settings\CurrentSettings.vssettings. Pay attention to the time stamp of the file to ensure it is getting written. Use SysInternals' Process Monitor if necessary to find out why the write is failing. Or suspect a troublesome add-in that does not let VS shutdown properly.

If absolutely necessary, you can edit the file yourself. Copy it to an .xml file so it is easy to reformat with Edit + Advanced + Format Document. The relevant entry looks like this (edited to fit):

    <Category name="Environment_PropertiesWindow" 
            Category="{731a3cc7-de5e-49ca-9115-9a03e46624b0}" 
            Package="{7494682b-37a0-11d2-a273-00c04f8ef4ff}"
            RegisteredName="Environment_PropertiesWindow"
            PackageName="Windows Forms Designer Package">
        <PropertyValue name="PbrsAlpha">1</PropertyValue>
        <PropertyValue name="PbrsShowDesc">1</PropertyValue>
    </Category>

The "PbrsAlpha" property value determines the sorting, it is 1 for alphabetical sort, 0 for category sort.

Answer 2

I did the same thing and saved settings file by changing PbrsAlpha value to "1" but the file will reset itself after restarting Visual Studio.

I found this solution:

Tools -> Import and Export Settings... -> Reset All Settings -> Save my current settings ( in case of a bad scenario) -> Finish