November 17th, 2022

Enable Group Policy Settings with Visual Studio Administrative Templates (ADMX)

IT Administrators often want to control, via group policy, certain aspects of Visual Studio behavior to achieve consistency, compliance, and compatibility across their organizations.

One challenge has been that there was no easy way to discover what global policies exist for Visual Studio. Because there was no centralized repository that captured the Visual Studio policy options, there was also no consistent method to deploy settings using standard management and deployment tools such as the Group Policy Editor or Microsoft Endpoint Manager, resulting in duplicated, inefficient, and sometimes incorrect effort.

To address this issue, we are very happy to announce the release of Visual Studio Administrative Templates (ADMX/ADML), which enables you to easily discover, manage and control Visual Studio behaviors governed by group policy settings. With this release, you will be able to configure settings for Visual Studio feedback, Live Share, install, update, and privacy settings such as those around the Customer Experience Improvement Program and Intellicode remote analysis.

The Visual Studio group policy settings contained in the ADMX file are machine-wide for all users, meaning they intend to cover all applicable installed instances, versions, and SKUs of Visual Studio. Sometimes a policy is particular to a specific version of Visual Studio, and the template clearly calls this out.

To get started enabling group policy settings for your organization, download the ADMX template package and select where you would like to install the template files. Installing to the default location ‘C:\Windows\PolicyDefinitions’ will enable the Group Policy Editor (gpedit.exe) tool to easily discover and edit available Visual Studio group policies.

 

Visual Studio Administrator Templates within Group Policy Editor tool

Visual Studio Administrator Templates within Group Policy Editor tool

As of June 2023, Microsoft Endpoint Manager now includes Visual Studio policies within the Settings catalog alongside other configuration policies such as those defined by Windows, Office and Edge. The documentation for using Visual Studio Administrative Templates to configure group policy settings in Microsoft Intune is available at Microsoft Learn.

For more information, please refer to the Visual Studio Administrators Guide.  As always, we welcome your feedback.  For problems or suggestions, please let us know by submitting your feedback at Visual Studio Feedback.

Author

Edward Skrod
Software Engineer II

I'm a software engineer working on .NET Core packaging and deployment solutions in Visual Studio.

Christine Ruana
Principal Program Manager

Christine started at Microsoft as an intern in 1991 on Word 1. She is currently a Program Manager on the Visual Studio release and acquisition team, and is focusing on helping enterprises easily acquire the product and stay secure. She lives in Redmond, Washington with two children in college and one still at home. She enjoys rock climbing and traveling and watching her peeps pursue their passions.

7 comments

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  • Joe Sanders

    Has the Intune ADMX import functionality been verified? It does not seem to work.

    Results in “The administrative template file failed to be sent to the device”, which appears to be because importing ADMX templates that target ‘Software\Policies\Microsoft’ are explicitly blocked, and VisualStudio is not on the allowed sub-key list per:
    https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/client-management/win32-and-centennial-app-policy-configuration#overview

    • Christine RuanaMicrosoft employee

      Hi Joe – you are unfortunately correct. Windows is in the process of adding Visual Studio to the allowable list, and their fix will ship in mid Feb.

  • Robert Heffernan

    There needs to be more features in this like being able to push out internal Nuget repositories so that everyone is on the same page.

    • Michael Taylor

      Can you be more specific about what you mean by this? Are you asking for the equivalent of a team settings file where all your devs can have the same settings? If so then I think you should post that using the Make a Suggestion feature in VS. Note that this has been requested since 2019 and the requests keep getting closed.

  • anonymous

    this comment has been deleted.

    • Michael Taylor · Edited

      While a company could certainly do that the inverse problem exists as well. If you have a team of developers and you want to take advantage of new features (such as .NET 7) then how can you guarantee all the team updates? This would be one solution.

      Yet another issue is around security. VS can be used by malicious players to gain access to a developer machine (which often has more privileges then a regular...

      Read more
    • Alex111

      Maybe you should look for a new company?