What if I need to edit my Visual Studio “devenv.exe.config” file?

Visual Studio is hosted by the executable file "devenv.exe", which is a complex, but otherwise regular Windows executable file. Thus, it also supports a configuration file, called "devenv.exe.config".

This config file contains some special settings, which you might need to edit, mainly because of backward compatibility with previous Visual Studio versions. For example, there are settings like "AppLocalAutongenNGenDisabled", "UseSmallInternalThreadStacks" and "DisableFXClosureWalk". You can shut down Visual Studio, edit this config file (it usually lives in the path "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\version\edition\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe.config"), and launch Visual Studio again.

However, generally speaking, you should avoid editing this file if at all possible. First, this file gets reverted to a previous version if you update or reinstall Visual Studio. Furthermore, if you have ten developers in your team, you need to update ten different configuration files.

Even so, it's handy to know that by changing this file, you can change how Visual Studio works. Most of the parameters can be set elsewhere, like in Visual Studio's options, but from time to time, you might need to adjust this configuration file.