Problem: Double clicking on .sln file does not open the solution in Visual Studio.
Solution: This may happen if you have some version control system installed, especially Clearcase. This is a problem with the extension-application association. If you right click on .sln file, you will see that the application associated with this extension is ‘Microsoft Visual Studio Version Selector’. Change the association to devenev.exe. You can find this executable under <Visual Studio installed directory>\Common7\IDE.
Next time when you double click on .sln file, it should open it Visual Studio IDE.
Note: This solution works for Microsoft Visual Studio 8 / 2005. This has not been tried on any other version.
November 14, 2006 at 9:35 pm
I think this usually happens when the solution file is not encoded in UTF-8. In this case, opening it with Notepad and saving it as a UTF-8 file should do the trick. Maybe Clearcase is the culprit in anyway.
November 15, 2006 at 4:30 am
That doesn’t seem to be the problem. Thanks for the pointer, I will keep this in mind whenever I run into a similar problem.
October 30, 2008 at 9:44 pm
Wow, thanks for the Notepad trick… I was going insane with this one Sln file just not wanting to open with double clicking it
December 6, 2008 at 11:54 pm
How in the world does microsoft get away with releasing this junk? I just spent 3 hours CHANGING A FIELD NAME in their flipping report writing program and also ran into this stupid issue.