Here’s a quick tip for those of you who’ve jumped into the Visual Studio 2013 Preview: hiding the “send feedback” smiley-face button in the upper-right of the window. I find it very distracting, and I know how to find the Connect site if I need to file a bug report. I searched the HKEY_CURRENT_USER Registry hive under Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\12.0_Config for “feedback” and found a key named {F66FBC48-9AE4-41DC-B1AF-0D64F0F54A07} under MainWindowFrameControls. Its default value was “Feedback Button,” which sounded like what I was looking for. After backing up the key to disk, I deleted the key and re-started Visual Studio. No more smiley!

Delete HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\12.0_Config\MainWindowFrameControls\{F66FBC48-9AE4-41DC-B1AF-0D64F0F54A07}.