Question

I have made several changes to both debug and release settings and now I want to return to factory settings. How could I do that?

Answer 1

There is no easy way to go back to the default configuration for a project file. When you create a new project it’s based off a template located in your Visual Studio directory (e.g. C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\ProjectTemplates\CSharp\Windows\1033\ClassLibrary.zip) and VS has no way of reapplying the template. However, you can manually go back to the default configuration by doing the following:

1. Delete *.user file in your project’s directory, this contains a few build configurations values such as command line arguments.
2. Create a new project that is the same type you’re trying to reset.
3. For the new empty project and your existing project: right click and select Unload Project, right click and select Edit, then copy all the PropertyGroup sections from new project and paste them over all the PropertyGroup sections in your old project.

The above assumes you didn’t actually add or remove any configurations or platforms, otherwise you will lose those changes. That should get almost all the settings back to their defaults without messing up your source files or references.