Here is a handy feature of Visual Studio which took me a while to discover when I started using the tool.
As part of packaging up an application it is common to store configuration settings within the registry. While using a Smart Device CAB project you can use the convenient Registry view to set up these values graphically.
The feature that I didn’t notice for a while is the fact that you can right click on the window to get an Import… menu item (as shown in the screenshot above). This enables you to import a group of settings from a *.reg file, which saves you manually entering them all via the IDE.
So how do you create a *.reg file? One way is to manually write one in a text editor. Another is to generate it via the Windows CE Remote Registry Editor utility. Once you have configured your device you can use this tool to export a specific sub-tree of the device’s registry as a *.reg file that you can then import directly into Visual Studio.
If you need to edit or manually create a *.reg file you can refer to the Microsoft Help and Support article “How to add, modify, or delete registry subkeys and values by using a registration entries (.reg) file” available at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/310516.
Although this article is specific to the desktop a number of the key details are the same for Smart Device development. Just replace use of the regedit utility with the Windows CE Remote Registry Editor discussed above.