PowerToys Run: Visual Studio plugin

January 23, 2025 ยท View on GitHub

Simple PowerToys Run experimental plugin for search Visual Studio recents.

Important

  • Support Visual Studio 2022 stable and preview (not tested with previous versions)
  • The plugin may stop working in case of changes to Visual Studio since is built on top of the vswhere.exe and %LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\VisualStudio\...\ApplicationPrivateSettings.xml
    • It gets installed instances of Visual Studio using vswhere.exe
    • Then gets recents from the CodeContainers.Offline section of the ApplicationPrivateSettings.xml file of the instance

Requirements

  • Visual Studio 2022
  • PowerToys minimum version 0.76.0

Installation

Via ptr

ptr add VisualStudio davidegiacometti/PowerToys-Run-VisualStudio

Manual

  • Download the latest release by selecting the architecture that matches your machine: x64 (more common) or ARM64
  • Close PowerToys
  • Extract the archive to %LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\PowerToys\PowerToys Run\Plugins
  • Open PowerToys

Localization

The plugin has limited user-facing strings, but due to feedback and downloads, version 0.4.0 and onward supports localization.
The goal is to cover the same languages as PowerToys.
Pull requests for new languages or improvements to existing translations are welcome.

  • Fork and clone this repository
  • Open Community.PowerToys.Run.Plugin.VisualStudio.sln in Visual Studio
  • In Solution Explorer, navigate to Community.PowerToys.Run.Plugin.VisualStudio\Properties
  • To enhance existing translations, open and update the relevant .resx file
  • To add a new language, create a new resource file named Resources.xx-XX.resx (e.g. Resources.it-IT.resx for Italian)
  • Once you're done, commit your changes, push to GitHub, and make a pull request

Screenshots

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