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I own a software development company (Tortrix Ltd.) providing software solutions and I.T. services to the Health Care industry. Our solutions include knowledge management dashboards, intranet & extranet solutions using Microsoft Office SharePoint Server as well as bespoke solutions.

When not trying to earn a living, I run the Midlands Developer network, which is a free microsoft orientated usergroup based in Coventry which meets every second tuesday of the month.

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Changing the Company Name in Visual Studio 2010

John Nunn

March 29, 2011

I have been getting rather frustrated by the fact my instance of Visual studio is registered with the company name ‘Microsoft’ this has led to all my applications having the company name property set to Microsoft by default, including any setup projects. It gets to be quite a chore to have to remember to change these every time. Because I have had to reinstall my development workstation I decided to try to fix this problem. it turned out to be relatively simple.

If you are making the changes before installing Visual Studio it is a lot easier as you only need to change one registry key (two if you are using a 64 bit version of windows).

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion

The Visual Studio templates get the Company name from the RegisteredOrganasation key. The RegisteredOwner key is used to determine who the owner of the software is, and used to generate the registration details, including the splash screen and the about dialog boxes.

A similar node exists if like me you are using a 64 bit version of windows, Visual Studio is a 32 bit application and uses WoW (Windows on Windows).

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion

Changing these causes Visual Studio to use the correct company name, however if you have already installed Visual Studio the splash screen still displays the old company name. This is because this screen is an image file which is generated during setup.

To change this simply run devenv /setup and the splash screen will be updated. If the user name needs to be updated as well then this can be done by changing the Visual Studio Registration details in the registry:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0\Registration

Again if you are running a 64bit version of Windows there is another key for the WoW settings:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0\Registration

Once this is done the splash screen should reflect your changes

as should the about dialog

Now all the templates should pick up the correct company name.