重新生成 Settings.settings

Question

I am in the process of refactoring a project that was, to my chagrin, written in Visual Studio. I come from a Linux background and find Visual Studio a catacomb of disempowering menus.

I am trying to move a Settings.settings file from one solution into another.

Copying all the text from Settings.Designer.cs has produced the desired compile time functionality, but I can't seem to use the gui for changing properties. The gui doesn't show any properties, unlike my source project. I also worry that my changes will disappear at VS's whim (when it regenerates this file).

How can I regenerate these properties from my existing configuration file?

Answer 1

You can delete the .Designer.cs file then exclude the .settings file from the project and include it again. Then the .designer file is regenerated.

In between, make sure to click on the Show all files button, otherwise you cannot see the file you have just excluded from your project.

Answer 2

I just had to do a similar thing.

What worked for me is this:

1. Add a settings file using 'Add....' Name it Settings.settings
2. Move the settings file to the Properties directory. (Just grab and move it.)
3. Now since that's an empty settings file, copy the older settings file (the one you want to move) to the same area, overwriting the one that was just created.
4. Run the custom tool to recreate Settings.Designer.cs

My problem was that I got stuck on trying to copy both the Settings.settings file and the Settings.Designer.cs. That was a no-go.

Answer 3

This is an old question. Now seems like none of the above answers apply to VS 2019, and yet this problem continues to exist in some fashion. I deleted and excluded and re-added until I could no longer remember what I did. But in the end, it started working. Looking at what VS added to my csproj file, I think the key is that you need this:

<Compile Update="Properties\Settings.Designer.cs">
  <DesignTimeSharedInput>True</DesignTimeSharedInput>
  <AutoGen>True</AutoGen>
  <DependentUpon>Settings.settings</DependentUpon>
</Compile>

Answer 4

According to this ASP.NET post , you can do this

If you edit the settings.settings file and the value in the settings.designer.cs file does not change, you can delete the settings.designer.cs file and then right-click on the settings.settings file and select "Run custom tool". That will regenerate the settings.designer.cs file.

Answer 5

you can importe settings from an other project. Simply Copy settings.setings from solution explorer then paste it in the other project. (same way you can use import over copy/paste) visual studio will generate automaticaly the config for (app.config).

first project

Second project

Second project

next when you click on designer visual studio should notify you all properties will be added to your app.config (and make it visible in you designer)

notification

Answer 6

All I had to do was to delete and exclude the file "settings.designer.cs". There was no problem with it in vs2019 and earlier versions. The solution of deleting the file was not in the intellisense.

Answer 7

In the project file, the Settings.settings must be added as Content for it to work (in my project it was added as None for some reason and then the code never got updated).

The settings block in your project file should look like this:

<ItemGroup>
  <Content Include="Properties\Settings.settings">
    <Generator>SettingsSingleFileGenerator</Generator>
    <LastGenOutput>Settings.Designer.cs</LastGenOutput>
  </Content>  
  <Compile Update="Properties\Settings.Designer.cs">
    <DesignTimeSharedInput>True</DesignTimeSharedInput>
    <AutoGen>True</AutoGen>
    <DependentUpon>Settings.settings</DependentUpon>
  </Compile>
</ItemGroup>