Determining the Names of Property Items on Options Pages
One of the challenges of programming against the DTE Properties collection is determining the exact names to use in the DTE.Properties call. Every setting has a specific name that is used to access its value. The name is derived from the title that is displayed on the associated page in the Options dialog box. For example, DTE.Properties("FontsAndColors", "TextEditor") is used to access the settings for the Fonts and Colors page.
Property Item Names
After Visual Studio has been run once, the property item names for the current instance of Visual Studio are stored in the following Windows registry key: HKCU\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0_Config\AutomationProperties\. This location always has the definitive list of names. The category names are the names of the subkeys of the AutomationProperties key (Database Tools, FontsAndColors, and so on). The page names are the names of the subkeys of the category keys. For example, the FontsAndColors category contains the Dialogs and Tool Windows, Printer, and TextEditor pages. You can view the registry by using the registry editor.
Note
In your code, type the names exactly as they are written in the registry key; this includes spaces. For example, use Dialogs and Tool Windows (with spaces), but use TextEditor (with no space).