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Showing posts from May, 2010

Why is my Visual Studio Solution (.sln) file not opening by double-clicking?

Generally, I double-click on my .sln files from Windows explorer to open the correct version of Visual Studio (I have VS 2005 and 2008 running on Windows XP).One day one of my Visual Studio 2008 solution file’s icon changed to that of the new VS 2010 icon (with blue and purple rings). And ever since when I double click it did not open VS 2008 nor my solution file. However, I open VS 2008 devenv.exe separately and do a File->Open and open my sln file. This got me on my nerve today and wanted to figure out what happened. Many Google searches revealed that the sln file is now set to open with Visual Studio version selector and not VS 2008 itself. Hence the disappearance of the 2008 icon (with a little 9 on it). Further search revealed that if the Line formatter in the file gets corrupted somehow (could be due to your source control system – I use SVN and it indeed corrupted the file), then the VS version selector will not be able to identify the version. If you hover over the soluti