On a mailing list I subscribe to, there was an interesting question, “How do you change the user information shown in the Visual Studio splash screen?” I’ve circled in red the user information below.
As I was curious about the same thing because my copy of Visual Studio shows that my company name is Microsoft, and it would be nice to say Wintellect instead. I don’t remember the Visual Studio installation having a field for setting the company name so I figured the information had to be in the registry somewhere and it would be a simple string value.
Searching for “John Robbins” or “Microsoft” under HKLMSoftwareWow6432NodeMicrosoftVisualStudio in the registry editor didn’t find any hits. Note that I’m running an x64 operating system, so if you are on 32-bit, you won’t have the “Wow6432Node” in your registry key. That was odd that those names did not exist, so I ran Process Monitor and set it up to look for just “DEVENV.EXE” and registry accesses. It turned out to be the obvious registry key, HKLMSoftwareWow6432NoneMicrosoftVisualStudio9.0SplashInfo, and the value is SplashInfo.
Interestingly, the SplashInfo value is a REG_BINARY, which means the data is in binary form. Looking at the data it’s obvious that the data is some structure containing all the UNICODE strings for the splash screen except the list of packages along the right hand side.
If you’re feeling brave, you can edit the strings in the registry editor dialog. I take no responsibility for dead copies of Visual Studio, hard feelings, or melancholy caused in your pet turtle.
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The SplashInfo is updated when run devenv /setup. A registry monitor session shows that in my case, the name is from UserName under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftVisualStudio8.0Registration; Organization is from RegisteredOrganization under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftWindows NTCurrentVersion.
You do not need to risk edit the binary data... :)
Interesting Finds: October 1, 2009
Dude you are a freaking mind reader! I just gave up trying to find this info a few days ago when I reinstalled Windows 7 RTM on all my machines. It drove me nuts that the MSDN stuff all had my company listed as Microsoft. Worst part is, whenever I created a new project in Visual Studio, it defaulted to having a Microsoft copyright in AssemblyInfo.cs. One day someone is gonna make a killer app and inadvertently will have handed it over to MS because of that oversight. :)
wow6432Node - Node! not none!
Spong,
Thanks! That was a typo, I fixed the article.
- John Robbins
How about registered user in Visual Studio 6.0? It can't be changed even with Hex Editor. Please help me about this!
Wow... didn't realize so many people would be annoyed by this, thought only I did.
Just finished installing my brand new VS 2012 on my brand new w8 (all properly licensed) and the end I realize that Windows was personalized to Windows User grrr.
Doing the devenv /setup did the trick for me on vs2012. Btw, if you completely remove (rename) the SplashHash key, you get a nice, blank startup screen.
Background info as well: http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/618076/after-reinstal-diferent-version-of-vs-splash-screen-still-displays-information-about-old-version
Happy coding!
For those still having problems with this for VS2012:
http://blog.brouwer.pro/2012/09/how-to-change-licensed-to-name-for-visual-studio-2012/
Thanks for the info. I too am one who was annoyed by the splash screen displaying my user name as I am setting up a template for all of my developers in our company and do not wish to have my user name displayed as the registered users on all developer machines created from this template. I was able to use the devenv /setup to change the splash screen for VS 2012, to display our company name as the registered user. I thought I was going to have to start my template all over again on a fresh OS until I found this link.
Thanks everyone.
Jt.