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I noticed that when I enter the Assembly Information dialog, for a project created in

  • Visual Studio 2010
  • Visual C#/Basic 2010 Express

...the company and copyright fields default to Microsoft (...). How odd is that? If a developer were to forget this, Microsoft practically brands software made by others as their own.

Is there some way I can change the defaults for this?

user
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Cecil Dishwasher
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  • It's just part of the template, not a Microsoft conspiracy to own your software. – Devin Burke Sep 18 '11 at 20:03
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    Yes, but it's new since VS 2005, so it's downright a little stupid. – Cecil Dishwasher Sep 18 '11 at 20:05
  • The alternative is defaulting to YourCompany, but then the programmer would look even sillier if s/he forgot to change it. – Devin Burke Sep 18 '11 at 20:11
  • The license that you clicked through when you installed VS *requires* you to claim copyright on your software. The name is just a place holder, making it obvious that a company name should be entered there. Nobody is likely to understand what "Contoso" means. – Hans Passant Sep 18 '11 at 20:18
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    Btw, I've seen several DLLs that had "Enter your company name here" in their copyright notice. Hehe. – Hans Passant Sep 18 '11 at 21:29

1 Answers1

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This is part of the default templates. You can add your own, or replace the defaults. For details, see Visual Studio Templates - in particular, Creating Project Templates.

Reed Copsey
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  • Thanks. Do you have any speculative comments as to why it's MS by default? :) – Cecil Dishwasher Sep 18 '11 at 20:04
  • @Cecil: They made the templates that are there by default. ;) Personally, I think they should make the defaults "Unknown" or something, not Microsoft, but I think they wanted to include *something* so people would know to put that in place. – Reed Copsey Sep 18 '11 at 20:06