microsoft / microsoft/terminal

Visual Studio 2022 Developer Profile GUID Not Consistent Across Reinstalls

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#19,063 6 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub
Area-Settings Issue-Bug Priority-3 Product-Terminal
Dominant language
C++
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Forks
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Avg merge
3d 17h
Merged PRs (30d)
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Description

### Windows Terminal version

1.22.11141.0

### Windows build number

10.0.26100.0

### Other Software

Microsoft Visual Studio Community 2022

### Steps to reproduce

1. Perform a fresh installation of Windows and Visual Studio Community 2022
2. Notice the two newly added profiles to Windows Terminal "Developer Command Prompt for VS 2022" and "Developer PowerShell for VS 2022"
3. Backup your settings.json for Windows Terminal
4. Repeat step 1 and notice the GUIDs of the profiles have changed; using your backed up configuration from step 3 on the new installation will not allow you to open those profiles as the GUIDs seem to be tied to the current installation and change upon reinstallation

**Note**: It is likely that this may occur upon reinstalling Visual Studio on the same Windows install but I haven't yet tested that scenario.

### Expected Behavior

I was expecting that it would be possible to backup and restore my Windows Terminal settings.json and have it work on a fresh installation of Windows with the Visual Studio 2022 profiles.

### Actual Behavior

Instead, the original profiles won't work on the new installation as their respective GUIDs will have changed and appear to be tied to the Visual Studio installation, making the old GUIDs unusable. Worse still, I can't seem to find where those GUIDs are defined so that I can template out the configuration file and replace the GUIDs myself.

The current behaviour makes it more confusing and difficult to backup and restore your settings.json across Windows reinstalls.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

Research direction

The issue names the Windows Terminal settings.json profiles but no source file or test. Start by comparing the generated Developer Command Prompt and Developer PowerShell profile GUIDs across fresh installations, then trace where those profile identifiers are assigned. Done means the profiles retain usable identifiers so a backed-up settings.json works after reinstalling Windows and Visual Studio.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
cpp
Domain
cli, operating-systems
Issue type
Bug
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
42/100

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