Double clicking on .sln does not open it

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.

24 thoughts on “Double clicking on .sln does not open it

  1. diegov says:

    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.

  2. generally says:

    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.

  3. pjcast says:

    Wow, thanks for the Notepad trick… I was going insane with this one Sln file just not wanting to open with double clicking it 🙂

  4. Grim Re-pear says:

    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.

  5. Gustaf says:

    Thank you diegov!

    Microsoft, shame on you, I just spent half a day on this!

  6. Gustavo G says:

    Finally I made it work!
    Many thanks for sharing this tip!

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