Ho to Manage and Remove Recent Projects in Visual Studio

How to change the number of recent projects stored

Visual Studio maintains a list of the most recent projects you’ve worked on so you can open them quickly. By default it maintains the 6 most recent projects on the start page. You can change how many projects it saves by opening the Tools > Options  menu.
Ensure the Environment tab is selected (it is the default tab)

To the right of the environment tab locate the box and change the number of Recent Projects to whatever you desire.

How to REMOVE PROJECTS from the recent projects list.

Recent Projects are stored in the registry – so proceed with caution whenever you make change to the registry – you want to be certain that you don’t remove keys that are critical to your Operating system.
To remove a single project…
Open the registry by clicking  Start (Start > Run in XP) and type RegEdit > (enter)

The Registry Editor will open. Drill down the following path…
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\ProjectMRUList… This is where you recent projects are stored in Visual Studio 2008.
(HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0\ProjectMRUList for Visual Studio 2008).
Simply delete the project entries that you no longer want to appear in Visual Studio.

How to clear ALL RECENT PROJECTS in Visual Studio without opening RegEdit

You can clear the projects by creating a .reg file that removes and re-creates the ProjectMRUList Key in the registry.
Open notepad and enter ALL the text between the  lines below…
*********************************
start copying after this line
*********************************
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[-HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\ProjectMRUList]
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\ProjectMRUList]
********************************
stop copying before this line
********************************
Next, save the file on your disk and change the extension from .txt to .reg.
Or you can download the file here…  clear_recent_projects.reg (184.00 bytes)
Now, whenever you want to clear the Recent Projects list, simply run the file by double clicking it. It will first delete the ProjectMRUList sub key (including all contained entries) and then create a new, empty one.
Enjoy.



Categories: Misc

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